Movie Review Fair Play

Fair Play (2023) 

Directed by Chloe Domont 

Written by Chloe Domont 

Starring Phoebe Dynevor, Alden Ehrenreich, Eddie Marsan, Rich Sommer 

Release Date September 29th, 2023 

Published October 12th 

Fair Play is a vile, ugly, nasty movie and I kind of love it. Few films have gotten under my skin as deeply as Fair Play has. I've struggled to write about the film until now simply because trying to gather my thoughts on it leaves me both enraged and exhausted. In a good way. I've written this review several times and thrown it out several times. I've written negative reviews and positive reviews and tried to figure out a way to talk about the movie without revealing too much about myself. That's the power of a work of art, when it can get inside you and mess around like that. 

Fair Play has a really clever opening shot. The camera opens on the back of Phoebe Dynevor's Emily at a party. She stands alone in the distance as Donna Summer's sex anthem, Love to Love You Baby plays on the soundtrack. The deeper meanings of this shot will become clear as the movie plays out. Emily, alone, singular, distant, and yet, sex is in the air. Sex has a big role to play in Fair Play. In fact, within mere moments of introducing Emily, we meet her boyfriend Luke (Alden Ehrenreich) and the two engage in deeply, unexpectedly transgressive sex that gets bloody. Note that, it's important later. 

The sex is followed by Luke almost accidentally asking Emily to marry him. He happened to be carrying a ring which fell out of his pocket as he was getting dressed. Despite the deeply inappropriate moment, Luke decides to ask Emily to marry him and she, surprisingly, says yes. The story of their engagement will be memorable, though I doubt it's the story they will tell their kids if they have any. Get ready because writer-director Chloe Domont is going to do this to us throughout Fair Play, taking life events and giving them a nasty twist. 

Emily and Luke met while working together at the same finance gig. Luke has been with the company longer and when an opening management comes around, both Emily and Luke assume that he will get the job. They even celebrate prematurely with sex. That night, at around 2 in the morning, Emily gets a call from their boss, Campbell (Eddie Marsan). He wants her to come have a drink and upon arrival, she's told that she will be getting the promotion that she thought was going to Luke. 

It gets more awkward as Luke will now be Emily's immediate underling, her analyst. She will have to tell him what to do and take credit for work that he will do on her behalf, such is the nature of the job. She has to make the hard decision on an investment, but it's based on his grunt work. Luke tries to be happy for his now secret fiancée but the cracks in the relationship are immediate and seemingly irreparable. It's not merely Luke's male ego or pride getting in the way, it's also the way both are tip toeing around each other at work and at home.

Find my full length review at Geeks.Media 

Movie Review Blackberry

Blackberry (2023) 

Directed by Matthew Johnson 

Written by Matt Johnson, Matthew Miller 

Starring Jay Baruchel, Glenn Howerton, Cary Elwes, Rich Sommer, Michael Ironside 

Release Date May 12, 2023 

Published? 

Blackberry is a story of technology, hubris, and the ways in which the world has been brought together via technology but people remain, quite predictably, human. The story of the rise of the first trendy handheld communication device, Blackberry charts the astonishing growth and precipitous fall of a fad unlike anything before it. Blackberry became a staple of high class living in the early 2000s. The ubiquity of the Blackberry became a meme before memes were cool. No caricature of a businessman was complete without them holding a Blackberry. 

How the Blackberry thus came and went as a phenomenon is a ripe subject for a movie. After all, how does something as ubiquitous and beloved become ancient and nearly forgotten in the span of just over a decade? It's hard to quantify, even less than 20 years after the Blackberry, how big the Blackberry got and how quickly it fell out of fashion. There are few phenomenon's quite like it. Perhaps a reasonable comparison for modern audiences might be Tiger King. The famed Netflix series was the hottest thing in the world and by the time it came for a sequel, people had already forgotten the people involved. 

The Blackberry lasted longer as a product but as a pop culture staple, the comparison is pretty good. Both became afterthoughts quicker than anyone involved could have imagined. The Blackberry's remarkable fall has roots in the way modern IT has changed the landscape of innovation. Where in the early days of the industrial revolution the innovation life-cycle was decades, today, the innovation life cycle is measured in years. Things in today's IT world change so quickly that even beloved innovations can expect to be outmoded within three years. 

There's a reason why we are on the 14th generation of the IPhone in the 16 years since it was introduced by Steve Jobs and his turtle neck. Technology is now a shark that must swim even when it sleeps. The Blackberry story was the trial balloon of modern technology. Innovators need to look no further than the 2002 introduction of The Blackberry and that same product's obsolescence a mere 5 years later when the IPhone crashed the market. 

As charted in the movie, Blackberry, the writing was on the wall from the early days. Mike Lazaridis (Jay Baruchel), the brains of the operation, was always in over his head as his employees walked all over him and took advantage of his genial good nature and lack of social grace. It's no wonder now, with grave hindsight, that Lazaridis would fall victim to a hard charging snake like Jim Balsillie (Glenn Howerton). Lazaridis just wanted to make new, helpful technology, a noble pursuit. He needed a ballbuster like Balsillie to push him to deliver his best, and it worked, if only for a moment in the span of our new technological evolutionary cycle. 

The casting here in Blackberry is rather brilliant. Jay Baruchel, known as a waif and a shrinking violet, when he isn't an obnoxious denizen of a Judd Apatow film, is just the kind of guy who would get run over by a big personality like that of Glen Howerton. The former star of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia star has a loud and brash personality that befits a scruples free businessman chasing every dollar and imposing his will upon the geeks and nerds that exist under his weighty boot. The dynamic is familiar, a genius who doesn't want the hassle of leadership and a dictator who is hungry for power at all cost come together like halves of a whole. 

Full length review at Geeks.Media 

Movie Review Scare Package 2: Rad Chad's Revenge

Scare Package 2: Rad Chad's Revenge 

Directed by Aaron B. Koontz

Written by Anthology 

Starring Zoe Graham, Jeremy King, Rich Sommer, Shakira Ja'nai Paye

Release Date December 22nd, 2022

Scare Package 2: Rad Chad's Revenge is an anthology horror comedy that takes the framing device of a Saw movie and uses it as a hanger for a series of short films deconstructing horror tropes. Overseen by director Aaron B. Koontz, it's a chaotic package of hits and misses, good ideas and bad ideas, and, most importantly, wildly inventive strangeness. There is a particular charm to the low budget aesthetic, one that painstakingly recalls 80s horror movies, and Saw, of course, and that charm worked on me, for the most part. 

A group of friends has gathered for the funeral of the late, great Rad Chad (Jeremy Buckley), horror movie lover and video store owner. Chad died from having a demon nearly explode his face with a punch. His funeral is attended by the 'Final Girl' of the original Scare Package, Jessie (Zoe Graham), her new girlfriend, Kimmie (Shakira Ja'Nai Paye), and Jessie's mother (Kelly Maroney), and several other faces familiar from the previous Scare Package film. 

In the midst of the mourning of Rad Chad, the guests find themselves incapacitated by gas and kidnapped. Trapped in some eerie basement, the group finds out via exposition video tape that they are to be part of Rad Chad's game of death. Much like a Saw movie trap, they've all been poisoned and must look for clues, escape room style to find the cure. But first, the must watch a short horror movie which may or may not contain clues for their survival. 

Click here for my review at Horror.Media 

Movie Review Summer of 84

Summer of 84 (2018)

Directed by Francois Simard, Anouk Whissell, Yoann Karl Whissell

Written by Matt Leslie, Stephen J. Smith 

Starring Graham Verschere, Judah Lewis, Rich Sommer 

Release Date August 10th, 2018

Published October 24th, 2018

Summer of 84 comes depressingly close to greatness. As I watched it, I thought perhaps I was seeing the next The Goonies or Stand by Me. What a shame it was then to watch the filmmakers trade greatness for shock value. The final act of Summer of 84 is such a bleak and bummer of an ending that what I thought was going to become a cult phenomenon became just another mediocre schlockfest.

Summer of 84 stars Graham Verschere as Davey, a not so average teenager in a relatively average small town. Along with his friends, Eats (Judah Lewis), Farraday (Corey Gruter Andrew) and Woody (Caleb Embry), Davey runs around town thinking and talking about girls he’s never touched and just generally being a kid. Things change however, when one of the newspapers on Davey’s paper route informs him that kids are missing from surrounding towns.

Davey’s passion happens to be conspiracy theories and his active imagination eventually lead him to suspect that his neighbor, Mr Mackey (Rich Sommer), may be the killer everyone is looking for. His friends are skeptical but eventually they come around and begin helping Davey snoop around Mr. Mackey’s house, rooting through his trash and digging up his garden, all in pursuit Davey’s wild theory.

But is his theory really so far-fetched? Davey did see a kid in Mackey’s house who looked a lot like a missing kid on a milk carton but he says it was his nephew. Mackey does buy a lot of dirt but he also has a sizable garden. Being a cop gives him the perfect cover, he knows how to evade suspicion. But, he’s been a cop in town for years and is a friend of Davey’s parents. Then again, where does Mackey go every night if he works during the day?

This is a solid idea that combines elements of Rear Window and Stand by Me with a touch of The Goonies. Early on, everything in Summer of 84 felt like it was going to provide some comic scares, those jumpy laughs where you’re a little frightened but the jump scares are intentionally funny. I adored that aspect of Summer of 84, the film had me laughing from the beginning and I had hoped that it would stick with that tone.

It’s a solid, professionally crafted movie with a terrific core cast. The stand out for me was Woody. Woody is a sweetheart, a loyal, lovable buddy that I think we all had when we were a kid. That kind of loyal to a fault type kid. You know the one, when you get in trouble, he gets in trouble because he was there to. That’s Woody for Davey, a loyalist, a partisan, a best friend who, when things get dangerous, overcomes his fear to be at his friend’s side.

Graham Verschere is also quite good as Davey, our eyes and ears. The camera is rarely away from Davey, he is the lead character and our surrogate into the world of Summer of 84. Verschere has a wonderfully curious quality, I loved his dogged inquisitiveness. As for Eats and Farraday, the characters of the bad boy and the nerdy kid limit them in terms of interest and aside from a couple of scenes, they become rather superfluous by the end of the movie.

I want so much to explain my objection to the ending of Summer of 84 but I won’t. I don’t do spoilers in my reviews. It’s a rule and it’s not one I am going to break here. Just know that the ending of Summer of 84 is a cheap shot, an unnecessary attempt at shock and it has no place in this otherwise good-hearted movie. Be prepared for disappointment and perhaps you can get over it in a way that I simply can’t. I am angry over the end of this movie.

Summer of 84 is available via on-demand services and is playing in a few movie theaters around the country as well.