Movie Review The Fall Guy

The Fall Guy (2024) 

Directed by David Leitch 

Written by Drew Pearce 

Starring Ryan Gosling, Emily Blunt, Winston Duke, Aaron Taylor Johnson, Hannah Waddingham 

Release Date May 3rd, 2024 

Published May 3rd, 2024 

The Fall Guy is so much fun. Ryan Gosling stars as stunt man Colt Seavers, the double for famed movie star Tom Ryder (Aaron Taylor Johnson). Colt has everything going for him, a great job that he loves doing, a great reputation, and he's just fallen in love with a camera operator on the new movie he's working on. Jody (Emily Blunt) and Colt are making plans and fliting and generally getting along smashingly when a stunt goes wrong. Performing a fall from a few stories up, Colt's rigging fails, and he smashes to the ground. 

Having suffered a devastating back injury, costing him his job and reputation as a stunt man, Colt retreats into a self-imposed isolation. This includes leaving Jody behind as he doesn't want her to see him as less than the man he was. 18 months go by, and Colt is just getting by parking cars when he receives an emergency call. Gail (Hannah Waddingham), Tom Ryder's protector and producer needs Colt to fly to Australia immediately to help out on Tom's new movie, Metal Storm. Tom has gone missing, and Gail needs Colt to stand in for him on the movie and also help find the missing star. 

Tom has apparently fallen in with some dangerous types down under and while Colt feels no obligation to help Tom, he decides to help because if he doesn't the movie will fall apart. Why does this matter? Because the director is Jody. It's her first time directing a major motion picture and if Tom disappears, she could get fired and lose everything. Wanting to reconnect with the woman he loves, Colt sets about trying to find Tom while performing his stunts on the movie, all while Jody finds new ways to punish him for ghosting her after his accident. 

Find my full length review in the Geeks Community on Vocal. 

Classic Movie Review Threesome

Threesome (1994) 

Directed by Andrew Fleming 

Written by Andrew Fleming 

Starring Josh Charles, Lara Flynn Boyle, Stephen Baldwin 

Release Date April 8th, 1994 

Published April 30th, 2024 

I'm pretty sure that Threesome is a horror film. I can't prove that definitively, there is nothing that documents that Threesome is a horror film. But! And this is important, it is a movie where Stephen Baldwin is one of three people involved sex act involving two other partner. If that doesn't send a horrified chill down your spine as much as Freddy Krueger's nails on metal does, then you likely don't know who Stephen Baldwin is. Take my word for it, you should shudder at the thought. I am relatively certain that 90s Stephen Baldwin is my sleep paralysis demon. He just sits on my chest and farts and laughs so hard he nearly falls off. 

Threesome stars Josh Charles as Eddy, a closeted and deeply confused young man. While his male friends are pursuing women, Eddy has no interest. Even moving into a dorm with a party animal and sex pest named Stuart (Stephen Baldwin) can't get Eddy interested in pursuing recreational sex. Eddy's development will be rushed along when Eddy and Stuart pick up a third roommate for the private ensuite in their dorm room. Alex (Lara Flynn Boyle) is a crazed narcissist who was accidentally assigned to a male dorm room because everyone assumed the name Alex indicates dude. 

Alex is standoffish at first but eventually begins throwing herself at Eddy who maintains confusion regarding Alex's motives well past what is believable. No joke, she's moments away from fully putting her hand on his penis and instead of saying he's not into her, he forces her to let him leave and then wonders to Stuart if Alex wants to be with him. Yeah, that's back to back scenes in this idiot sandwich of a movie. Meanwhile, Stuart desperately wants to bang Alex and she shows no interest in him. Eventually, it will come out that Eddy prefers men but that doesn't stop Alex who vows to change his mind by any sexual means necessary. 

Find my full length review in the Geeks Community on Vocal. 

Movie Review Turtles All the Way Down

Turtles All the Way Down (2024) 

Directed by Hannah Marks 

Written by Elizabeth Berger, Isaac Aptaker 

Starring Isabela Merced, Cree Cicchino, Felix Mallard, Judy Reyes 

Release Date May 2nd, 2024

Published 

Turtles All the Way Down is a film adaptation of Hank Green novel. The film stars Isabela Merced as a teenager struggling with OCD and other related mental issues, some of which are related to the death of her father. Merced's Aza gets roped into a true crime story by her best friend, Daisy (Cree Cicchino from Nickelodeon's Game Shakers), after a friend's father goes missing. The friend is a smoking hottie named Davis Pickett (Felix Mallard). Davis and Aza met at a camp for kids who have lost parents. Now, Davis has seemingly lost another parent under very suspicious circumstances and Daisy thinks they can find him and collect a reward. 

It's a more than a little convoluted but, I must say, I completely adore Cree Cicchino as Daisy. She feels exactly like the kind of friend who enjoy getting into trouble with. Granted, trying to solve a missing person case is not your average kind of trouble to find, but nevertheless that's the plot and damned if Cicchino's infectious excitement doesn't make you want to follow her down this rabbit hole. Naturally, this is a Hank Green adaptation so it will be a journey of self-exploration, there is grief, mental illness and teen romance. Aza and Davis are on a collision course and how he takes to finding out that she's trying to get a reward for finding her dad is the pivot point for what drama there is in Turtles All the Way Down. 

At least, that's what you might think. Director Hannah Marks and co-screenwriters Elzabeth Berger and Isaac Aptaker upend expectations in a very unpredictable way. I won't spoil it, but how you take to this unusual way of shifting expectations is a strong indicator of whether you enjoy Turtles All the Way Down. How did I feel about it? I didn't mind seeing what I expected completely subverted. That said, it's quite the ask for audiences to believe something like this is possible. It's an outlandish reach for the movie to pull this off and I can't say I am certain it works. 

Find my full length review in the Geeks Community on Vocal. 

Movie Review Happy Hunting

Happy Hunting (2017) 

Directed by Joe Dietsch, Louie Gibson

Written by Joe Dietsch, Louie Gibson 

Starring Martin Dingle-Wall, Ken Lally, Kenny Wormald 

Release Date September 22nd, 2017 

Published September 20, 2017 

Happy Hunting is one of the better horror movies of 2017. This Most Dangerous Game knock off takes the premise of hunting humans and puts a redneck, Mexican border setting to it and lets loose with a serious amount of blood and guts. The film reminded me a little of 2016’s brilliant horror-thriller Green Room which used a backwoods milieu to similar effect. That film is far better than Happy Hunting but that this film brings that one to mind says something about how good Happy Hunting really is.

Happy Hunting stars Martin Dingle Wall as Warren, a drunk drifter who gets invited to Mexico to pick up what may or may not be his child. The mother of the child has died and claims the child belongs to Warren but the only way for him to know for sure is to drive to Mexico. Broke and drunk, Warren needs cash so he concocts the worst batch of meth he could cook and tries to sell it to some meth-heads nearby. Needless to say, this doesn’t go well.

After narrowly escaping the meth-heads, leaving bodies in his wake, Warren finds himself in a small Texas border town that looks on the brink of death. Holing up in a motel with the meth-heads money, Warren, naturally stays drunk while he waits to be told where in Mexico he needs to go. Unfortunately, the town hunt is just getting underway and the hunters do not take kindly to visitors. While Warren briefly seeks solace at an AA meeting he meets Steve (Ken Lally) who wants to be his sponsor.

Steve, like everyone else in town, has a secret, he’s a hunter and seeing Warren new in town, he’s chosen him as the prize for he and his wife Cheryl (Sherry Leigh) to hunt down. After drugging Warren they drag him to the town square where he and four other men are set to go running off into the desert to run for their lives from an assortment of small town badasses who’ve become quite proficient at hunting human beings over the years.

Read my full length review in the Geeks Community on Vocal 

Movie Review Shot

Shot (2017) 

Directed by Jeremy Kagan 

Written by Anneke Campbell, William Lamborn 

Starring Noah Wyle, Sharon Leal, Jorge Lendeborg Jr. 

Release Date September 22nd, 2017 

Published September 15th, 2017 

The new-in-theaters drama Shot starring Noah Wyle and Sharon Leal may look like a very special episode of a TV drama but it’s a very effective very special episode of a TV drama. This anti-gun message movie, which does also play like an 87-minute public service announcement at times, nevertheless does have a valuable message. The shooting style may not blow you away but the performances are solid and the message is potent.

Things are not going great for Mark Newman (Wyle) on this Friday afternoon. He’s just been told that he has 36 hours to finish five days’ worth of work he’s doing as a sound editor on a movie followed by a lunch date with his soon to be ex-wife Phoebe (Sharon Leal). This portion of his rotten day, however, is about to get worse as not far from where he and Phoebe are finishing another argument a teenager named Miguel (Jorge Lendeborg Jr.) has just been handed a gun which he immediately fumbles and fires, sending a bullet into Mark’s chest.

Here’s when the film supposedly gets clever as it turns into a real-time drama from the moment Mark is shot, about 7 minutes into the movie, and the next hour or so as Mark lies on the sidewalk, is rushed to the hospital and undergoes an examination by an E.R. doctor played by the wonderful character actor Xander Berkley. These scenes have an exceptional authenticity to them, especially if you’ve ever been in an emergency medical situation.

Find my full length review in the Geeks Community on Vocal. 

Classic Movie Review The Princess Bride

The Princess Bride (2017) 

Directed by Rob Reiner 

Written by William Goldman 

Starring Cary Elwes, Mandy Patinkin, Chris Sarandon, Christopher Guest, Wallace Shawn, Robin Wright, Andre the Giant, Billy Crystal Carole Kane

Release Date September 25th, 1987 

Published September 20th, 2017 

The Princess Bride is one of the most rewatchable movies in history. This rich, robust, and homey comedy never ages and never falters. Rob Reiner’s direction, aside from a truly terrible film score, is unassailable in every comedy beat. Then there is the absolutely perfect casting. Cary Elwes, Robin Wright, Mandy Patinkin, Andre the Giant, and each of the supporting players, from Chris Sarandon as the evil Prince, Christopher Guest as the evil six-fingered henchman, and Billy Crystal’s cameo as Miracle Max, could not be better.

This weekend, September 25, The Princess Bride turns 30 years old and I am happy to tell you that I have probably seen this movie more than 30 times in that 30 years. The film feels like home to me with these wonderfully erudite characters, their supreme code of conduct, and the wonderfully generous laughs. I can’t call The Princess Bride a perfect movie, once again I will mention that terrible film score, but it’s damn near perfection.

Westley (Cary Elwes) is a young farm boy in the employ of the family of Buttercup (Robin Wright). Though Buttercup attempts to annoy her farm boy with one silly task after another we are told in Peter Falk’s wonderful voiceover that Westley’s constant refrain, "as you wish," to each of her requests is his way of confessing his love for her. Eventually, Buttercup realizes that she’s been annoying him because she’s been trying to hide her feelings for him and the two fall madly in love just as Westley is about to leave.

Westley is to take to the seas to seek his fortune so that he may soon return and give Buttercup the life she richly deserves. Unfortunately, it’s reported that Westley’s ship was attacked by a pirate legend known as the Dread Pirate Roberts and he does not take prisoners. With Westley thought dead, Buttercup becomes distant and lonely and when the Prince (Chris Sarandon) arrives at her door wanting to make the most beautiful girl in the kingdom his future Queen she accepts knowing that she is only giving her body to the task but not her heart.

What Buttercup doesn’t know is that the Prince is merely using her and plans to kill her with his first plan to have her kidnapped and killed in the fields of the rival kingdom of Gilder. The princess’s captors are a wonderful comic mixture with the leader Vizzini (Wallace Shawn) claiming to be the smartest person in the world, while his henchmen, Inigo (Mandy Patinkin) and Fezzik (pro wrestling super-legend Andre the Giant) are the greatest swordsman and the biggest brut in the kingdom respectively.

Read my full length review in the Geeks Community on Vocal. 

Movie Review American Assassin

American Assassin (2017) 

Directed by Michael Cuesta

Written by Stephen Schiff, Michael Finch, Edward Zwick, Marshall Herskovitz 

Starring Dylan O'Brien, Michael Keaton, Sanaa Lathan, Taylor Kitsch 

Release Date September 15th, 2017 

Published September 16th, 2017 

American Assassin stars Dylan O’Brien as Mitch Rapp, a normal college age kid who we meet while he is vacationing in Ibiza with his beautiful girlfriend. Just after she has accepted his marriage proposal, terrorists sweep over the beach, killing dozens of people in an all too plausible scenario that calls to mind the Paris nightclub attack. Among the dead is Mitch’s new fiancée while he is wounded in the leg and shoulder but narrowly survives.

Cut to 18 months later, a dejected Mitch is now sporting a full beard and a whole set of new muscles on his thin frame. We watch as he corresponds with Muslim terrorists via a private chat network. Mitch is getting himself recruited to become a terrorist with the goal of getting all the way to the man who organized the attack on the beach that killed his girlfriend. What Mitch doesn’t know is that the CIA, specifically deputy director Irene Kennedy (Sanaa Lathan), is in on his private messages and are set to spoil his chance at vengeance.

Once Mitch is the hands of the CIA, he is turned over to a secret training organization headed up by a badass former Navy Seal and spy named Hurley (Michael Keaton). Hurley doesn’t think Mitch is emotionally stable enough for the kinds of missions he trains people for but soon enough Mitch proves to be one of only two recruits with the capability to keep up with Hurley and with a major mission coming up to stop a nuclear bomb from being built, there is no time to waste on whether or not Mitch is ready or not.

American Assassin moves at a brisk pace. Director Michael Cuesta may not have a great ear for dialogue based off the leaden, exposition-laden jargon of American Assassin, but he has a terrific eye for action. The opening assault on the beach in Ibiza is frighteningly real and graphic. Some will consider the scene exploitation but I feel it accurately reflects where the story is heading without being disrespectful to real-life tragedies. This is the kind of attack that we’ve seen before and the way Cuesta captures it is intense and jarring.

Find my full length review in the Geeks Community on Vocal 

Movie Review Lipstick Under My Burkha

Lipstick Under My Burkha (2017) 

Directed by Alankrita Shrivastava 

Written by Alankrita Shrivastava 

Starring Ratna Pathak, Konkona Sen Sharma, Aahana Kumra 

Release Date July 21st, 2017 

Published July 19th 2017 

“You know what our problem is? We dream too much?”

That quote is devastating. It comes from the movie Lipstick Under My Burkha from writer director Alankrita Shrivastava. It’s a remarkable film about four wonderful characters staring into the face of oppression and still trying to live their dreams. Lipstick is only Shrivastava’s second directorial feature and yet she directs with the surety and beauty of a veteran filmmaker. Her eye and ear are perfectly in tune to her characters, who each have big beautiful beating hearts.

Auntie (Ratna Pathak) is at the center of the story, a brilliant, well-respected elder in her community. Yet, she is only 55 years old and a widow and her desires have not cooled with age. Auntie has been Auntie for so long that just trying to say her own name is a challenge. Reclaiming her name is the start of admitting she still has the desires she’s been nursing via a romance novel that she reads as the film’s narration with the story acting as a not too blatant Greek chorus to the story of the movie.

Auntie’s desires come to the fore when she meets a much younger swim instructor whose muscled torso fires the dreams she has of the male character in her book. Pushing her desires ever further she begins to carry on a secret phone relationship with the young man and dreams of perhaps finding the courage to tell him who she really is and how he stirs her soul and so much more. Ratna Pathak could not be better cast in the role of Auntie, still a beauty at 55 with tender eyes and an inner strength radiates to the very end.

Read my full length review in the Geeks Community on Vocal. 

Classic Movie Review Mauvais Sang

Mauvais Sang (1987) 

Directed by Leos Carax

Written by Leos Carax 

Starring Michel Piccoli, Juliette Binoche, Denis Levant 

Release Date September 9th, 1987 

Published September 10th 2017 

Mauvais Sang or Bad Blood, the English title, stars Dennis Levant as Alex, a small time criminal about to break into the criminal big time. After the death of his father, Alex is sought by his father’s former associates, Marc (Michel Piccoli) and Hans (Hans Meyer) to be part of a heist that will require his quick hands. The heist involves stealing the cultures of a dangerous virus that is ravaging France, a plague that affects those who make love without being in love.

The esoteric virus is a relatively minor player in the drama of Mauvais Sang which is far more interested in the love triangle of Alex, Marc and Marc’s much younger love Anna (Juliette Binoche). Though she is very young, Anna makes it clear that Marc is the only love she has ever known until Alex comes along and upsets their insular little world. Marc has recently become distant following the death of Alex’s father as he believes his rival, an old woman only referred to as The American, was behind the death and is plotting his murder as well if he can’t pull off the virus heist.

Marc’s growing emotional distance and Alex’s insistent romancing are the forces at war for much of the film’s second act which features a 30 minute scene in which Alex and Anna talk and bond and flirt and warn each other of the potential downfalls of a relationship between them. Anna maintains that she loves Marc, despite his age and growing coldness toward her. Alex meanwhile is insistent on his feelings and the scene culminates with a glorious expression of Alex’s newfound love, a street dance/run set to David Bowie’s Modern Love.

Read my full length review in the Geeks Community at Vocal. 

Classic Movie Review Rosemary's Baby

Rosemary's Baby (1968) 

Directed by Roman Polanski 

Written by Roman Polanski 

Starring Mia Farrow, John Cassavetes, Ruth Gordon, Ralph Bellamy

Release Date June 12th, 1968 

Published September 10th, 2017 

Rosemary’s Baby is one of the most sneakily ingenious psycho-dramas ever made. Director Roman Polanski, a quite correctly demonized figure today, was a masterful director in his day. In Rosemary’s Baby, arguably his finest film, Polanski uses film technique and his unique sensibilities to take seemingly normal and mundane things and use our perceptions of those things against us. The most obvious and blatant of these mundane things is using the elderly as the film’s villains, especially the grandmotherly Ruth Gordon.

Rosemary’s Baby is set in New York in 1965. Rosemary is an aspiring housewife to Guy (John Cassavetes), an actor looking for a big break on Broadway while making a living as an actor in commercials. Rosemary and Guy have just landed a beautiful new apartment in a venerated old building with a very creepy history. According to a friend, the building was the home to several disturbing deaths and rumors of occult activities.

This, however, does not put off Rosemary, at least not until she meets the neighbors. Minnie (Gordon) and her husband Roman (Sidney Blackmer) seem like the doting grandparent types by the look of them but when they begin to force their way further and further into the lives of Rosemary and Guy we completely understand why Rosemary feels as uncomfortable as she is. Roman, by some luck, is a producer and when Guy begins spending more time with him his career begins to turn around.

Meanwhile, the couple is trying to get pregnant and here is where Polanski pulls off a really neat and disturbing trick. In what seems as if it could be a dream, Rosemary finds herself slowly beginning to pass out and dream that she is on a yacht with friendly people having a nice time. However, the edges of her dream seem to be tearing away and a bizarre sort of reality is seeping into the fantasy, a dark disturbing reality that finds a nude Rosemary tied to a bed in a room full of nude old people and her freaked out husband. She is then raped by the Devil himself, a cloven hooved demon who climbs on top of her while the old folks chant creepily.

Find my full length review in the Horror Community on Vocal. 

Movie Review Mother

Mother (2017) 

Directed by Darren Aronofsky 

Written by Darren Aronofsky 

Starring Jennifer Lawrence, Javier Bardem, Ed Harris, Michelle Pfeiffer 

Release Date September 15, 2017 

Published September 14th, 2017 

I can’t decide if Mother(!) is Darren Aronofsky’s way of pleasuring himself on screen or if it is a legitimate work of art simply out of the grasp of my pea brain. The film has some seemingly obvious metaphors but they are metaphors that are so blatant that your brain fights the idea that they could be so simple to untangle. At least we can all agree that Mother(!) is a pretentious as all get out work of an egotist artist who’s either far too oblique for his own good or a complete troll.

Mother(!) is the title character played by Jennifer Lawrence who opens the film completely engulfed in flames before waking up in bed. Was it a dream? Stick around, the movie has a little something for you on that later. Mother and her writer husband, played by Javier Bardem, are living in an idyllic old home that has been recovered from a fire. This unique home sits in the middle of a field or perhaps a ‘garden,’ one might call it Eden-like.

The idyll of their country home is upended by the arrival of a snake-like gentleman, played by a skinny, leathery, Ed Harris, who claims to be one of the Husband’s biggest fans. Considering there is no place to stay for miles around they allow the man to spend the night. Then the next day his wife arrives played by Michelle Pfeiffer followed by their warring children played by Domnhall and Brian Gleeson who set about acting out a version of Cane and Abel inside these strangers’ home.

This portion of the film ends with a funeral and a finale in which Mother accuses her husband of not wanting to have sex with her to which he replies with what begins as attempted rape and then becomes a brief sex scene leading to a bizarre reveal and an even more bizarre final act of the film that I will leave you to discover on your own. The portentousness of the reveal is kind of fun and exciting but that pay off was a deal breaker for me, I was pretty much done with Mother(!) at this point and there was still a whole act of full on madness to come.

The lead up to the sex scene in Mother(!) basically states that a woman who is angry or unhappy with her husband to the point where she’s ready to leave him can be satisfied with a good sexing. This, to me, is such a gross and simplistic notion, so remarkably, ludicrously sexist that it seems like a provocation just to get that accusation. Unfortunately, Mother (!) doesn’t offer any rebuttal to this idea. Lawrence’s Mother is ready to leave her husband for not loving her, he attempts to take her by force, she eventually acquiesces because his forcefulness is a turn-on and the movie moves on. There is no attempt to satirize this notion, it is merely presented and that, for me, knocked me out of the movie.

Read my full length review in the Geeks Community on Vocal. 

Classic Movie Review Fatal Attraction

Fatal Attraction (1987) 

Directed by Adrian Lyne 

Written by James Dearden 

Starring Michael Douglas, Glenn Close, Anne Archer 

Release Date September 18th, 1987 

Published September 17th, 2017 

Fatal Attraction stars Michael Douglas as a seemingly happy husband to Ann Archer and father to an adorable 6-year-old daughter. So why, if he’s so happy, does he decide to cheat on his wife? This questions comes to consume the mind of Alex (Glenn Close), the woman Douglas’ Dan decides to sleep with one night while his wife and daughter are away visiting family in the suburbs. Alex can’t understand why Dan would choose to sleep with her and then retreat back to his marriage.

That Alex is also mentally unbalanced does not help matters. Moments after Dan attempts to leave Alex for good and return to his normal upper middle-class life, Alex attempts to kill herself and Dan, not wanting anyone to find out about his fling, decides he needs to stay the night again to make sure Alex doesn’t die and thus potentially reveal his infidelity in the process. This is a decision he will come to regret as saving Alex’s life only furthers her obsession with him.

Will Dan get up the courage to tell his wife what he has done? Will he do it before Alex’s unhinged behavior becomes dangerous to Dan’s entire family? These are the questions of a very minor, very forgettable sub-genre of thrillers. And yet, somehow Fatal Attraction became a massive hit in 1987 and remains part of the cultural zeitgeist 30 years later. Actress Glenn Close as recently as the 25th Anniversary of the film’s release was still being told that she’d terrified men who saw the film.

Why? Why this movie? Why Fatal Attraction? What is it about this sleazy genre thriller that has lasted this long? What is it that keeps this film in our pop culture memory? It baffles me because I have seen knock off after knock off after knock off of the Fatal Attraction formula and none of them are any good. Certainly there is something to be said for being an original but shouldn’t the movie be better than this to last this long?

Fatal Attraction is a cheap, sleazy, silly thriller with over the top performances and capable but not outstanding direction. Adrian Lyne is a director obsessed with sexual politics but he doesn’t have much depth to his obsession. Lyne’s style is to ask big questions but not give the questions much weight beyond the plot in progress. The big question of Fatal Attraction is ‘What would you do if you were Dan?’ That’s not a very interesting question. Everything that happens to Dan is his own fault and while Lyne seems to want us to sympathize with him as Alex goes on the attack, it’s almost comical how unsympathetic Dan is.

Read my full length review in the Geeks Community at Vocal. 

Movie Review The Wilde Wedding

The Wilde Wedding (2017)

Directed by Damian Harris 

Written by Damian Harris 

Starring Glenn Close, John Malkovich, Patrick Stewart, Minnie Driver, Jack Davenport 

Release Date September 15th, 2017 

Published September 13th, 2017 

The Wilde Wedding has the chance to be a pretty great movie but lacks the courage to pull it off. The film brings together the talents of Glenn Close, John Malkovich and Patrick Stewart for a wedding comedy and the charm factor would be off the charts except that writer-director Damian Harris can’t resist mucking up the works by having the younger cast too often crowd out the more interesting veterans.

The Wilde Wedding casts Glenn Close as world famous movie star Eve Wilde. Eve is on the verge of her 4th marriage; this time to a novelist named Harold Alcott (Stewart) who could not be less suited for her. We meet Harold as he is arriving for the weekend wedding with his two daughters and a friend and appears to be cramming for a test on Eve’s IMDB page. He can’t seem to remember the names of Eve’s most famous movies and seems to be of the belief that if he can’t remember them he won’t be able to get married.

Joining the wedding party is Laurence, Eve’s first ex-husband played by Malkovich. Pompous but charming, it was Laurence who’d gotten Eve her first role in Hollywood, one that very quickly eclipsed his own Hollywood start and eventually led to trouble in their marriage. Laurence and Eve have three sons, played by Noah Emmerich, Rob Langeder and Peter Fascinelli who are each given one trait to portray based off the simplistic notions of the emotional trauma of having been children of divorce.

They are joined by various girlfriends, assistants, friends or children, all very limited in their screen time and none of much particular interest. Minnie Driver plays one of the son’s rock star ex-wife who sings a pretty terrible cover of Billy Idol’s White Wedding as a supposed wedding gift while Grace Van Patten is the requisite millennial who is on hand to film everything for a documentary as her gift to her grandmother. Van Patten is saddled with an attraction to her cousin whom she insists is a first cousin once removed because that’s somehow less creepy or necessary to the story?

Read my full length review in the Geeks Community on Vocal. 

Classic Movie Review The Pick Up Artist

The Pick Up Artist (1987) 

Directed by James Toback

Written by James Toback 

Starring Molly Ringwald, Robert Downey Jr. 

Release Date September 18th, 1987 

Published September 19th, 2017 

The Pick Up Artist is a bizarrely bad movie of the kind only James Toback seems capable of. This mess of a romantic comedy and a gangster movie attempts to be both conventional and unconventional. Toback’s thing has always been arthouse style talky existentialism with a healthy dose of New York. Watching him try to cram that unusual sensibility into a mainstream movie would be unwatchable were it not for Robert Downey Jr. and Molly Ringwald who, at the very least, remain likable even as they struggle against a director lost in his attempt to serve the commercial and the arty.

Jack Jericho is a pick up artist. He practices his terrible pick up lines in his bathroom mirror before he leaves to run the streets like a dog chasing every squirrel in his field of vision. That Jack plies his trade in the morning before he goes to work as a grade school gym teacher, odd, inexplicable choice of profession aside, makes his aims seem strange from the very beginning. Is Jack looking for dates or sex or both? Writer-Director Toback doesn’t seem to know or very much care.

The comedy for Toback is in Jack’s failing, silly attempts at meeting women. He seems fascinated by Downey chatting up chicks and dedicates much of the first portion of the movie to just listening to Jack try and stay in front of the various women he accosts on the street. In fact, the movie pretty much derails from the very beginning because Toback is more interested in the pick up lines and Downey’s charm than he is in setting up the ludicrous gangster story that is shoehorned into this 82 minute movie.

Read my full length review in the Geeks Community on Vocal. 

Classic Movie Review Requiem for a Dream

Requiem for a Dream (2000) 

Directed by Darren Aronofsky

Written by Darren Aronofsky

Starring Jared Leto, Jennifer Connelly, Marlon Wayans, Ellen Burstyn 

Release Date October 6th, 2000 

Published October 2017 

With Darren Aronofsky's latest film Mother starring Jennifer Lawrence arriving in theaters across the country this week, now is the perfect time to look back on the best of Aronofsky's career thus far. You can hear more about Mother and the style of Darren Aronofsky on the next "Everyone Is a Critic Movie Review Podcast" available on iTunes every Monday Morning.

Darren Aronofsky is driven by an obsession with obsession. His characters are those that are driven past the brink of madness by their obsessions. The math in Pi, the drugs in Requiem for a Dream, love and immortality in The Fountain, to be the best in Black Swan, Piety and to build a boat in Noah, Aronofsky’s characters are obsessives who risk everything for their goals no matter how dangerous or wrong-headed those goals may be.

In Requiem for a Dream obsession is the underlying element of addiction. Addiction drives those obsessed with their ideas of what they believe will make them happy. For Harry (Jared Leto), what he believes will make him happy is settling down with Marion (Jennifer Connelly), opening a business, maybe starting a family all the while continuing to shoot heroin. His obsession is the goal of being happy while also remaining on heroin; a poignantly sad goal he doesn’t realize is entirely at odds.

Marion meanwhile, shares some of Harry’s obsession with happiness but is far more defined by her desire to be different from her rich parents. Throughout the film, Marion makes only minor references to her parents but each is a revelation about her character. Early on, Marion mentions that money is not what she wants from her parents but rather for them to show concern for her that doesn’t involve finance. As she goes deeper into her addiction however, it becomes clear that her parents’ inattention isn’t as much the problem as is her desire to be different from them, that which drives her further toward degradation and addiction.

Find my full length review in the Geeks Community on Vocal. 

Movie Review Home Again

Home Again (2017) 

Directed by Hallie Meyers Shyer 

Written by Hallie Meyers Shyer 

Starring Reese Witherspoon, Nat Wolff, Jon Rudnitsky, Pico Alexander, Lake Bell, Michael Sheen, Candace Bergen

Release Date August 29th, 2017

Published August 28th, 2017

Home Again is a vacuous and inane movie that is otherwise an inoffensive and forgettable romantic comedy about characters who have no problems. It’s the kind of vacuousness that you would think even Hollywood would be tired of by now and yet there still seems to be an appetite for it. I think it’s called lifestyle porn, wherein the poor watch movies like Home Again and fantasize about the architecture and accoutrements without a care for whether or not the characters’ lives are worth enduring.

Home Again makes for fine lifestyle porn if not an actual movie. It’s all very pretty and pretty empty. The film stars Reese Witherspoon as the mother of two daughters who has just fled her marriage to a rock promoter in New York, played by Michael Sheen, for her late father’s home in Los Angeles. Her life is upended like a bad CW show when she has a near one night stand with a much younger man who her kooky mom (Candace Bergen) invites to live in her guest house along with his two pals.

The three guys are Harry (Pico Alexander), Teddy (Nat Wolff), and George (Jon Rudnitsky), three aspiring filmmakers. Harry is the impossibly handsome… director? Yeah, the super-handsome guy is the one who plays the director. I’m not saying directors can’t be handsome, but it was a curious choice in the casting here to take the relatively unknown but super-handsome Pico Alexander and cast him as the artistic visionary and have the much more well known and slightly less handsome Nat Wolff play the movie star.

Find my full length review in the Geeks Community on Vocal. 

Movie Review It Chapter 1

Stephen King's It (2017)

Directed by Andy Muschietti 

Written by Chase Parker, Cary Fukunaga, Gary Dauberman

Starring Jaeden Lieberher, Bill Skarsgard, Finn Wolfhard, Sophia Lillis 

Release Date September 8th, 2017

September 7th, 2017 

To say that the 2017 take on Stephen King’s Magnum Clown Opus IT is better than the 1990 mini-series is an understatement. The mini-series was a punishing nearly four-hour mix of a pretty good kids’ story and a nearly impossible to watch adult story. Jettisoning the adult story in favor of focusing on the far superior kids’ story from King’s novel, the 2017 IT crafts a tightly wound, creepy horror flick that plays on some serious issues about grief and abuse while delivering the kind of machine tooled jump scares that modern audiences go to the movies for.

IT stars Jordan Lieberher as Bill, the ringleader of a group of friends who are often picked on and lean on each other for support. Bill’s friends include Eddie (Jack Dylan Grazer), Richie (Finn Wolfhard), and Stanley (Wyatt Oleff). Along through, the story the core group adds Ben (Jeremy Ray Taylor), a chubby kid who is new in town, Mikey (Chosen Jacobs), a home-schooled farm kid, and Beverly (Sophia Lillis), a young beauty who has an unwarranted reputation around the small town of Derry, Maine.

The story kicks off in 1988 when Bill’s little brother Georgie (Jackson Robert Scott) goes outside to play in the rain and goes missing at the hands of the evil clown Pennywise (Bill Skarsgard). In a scene that is actually quite shocking for modern horror film, Georgie’s disappearance sets a tone of fear and dread that director Andy Muschietti, a first-time feature director, does a tremendous job of maintaining over the course of the film’s two hour and fifteen-minute running time. The scene is legit frightening and Pennywise "The Dancing Clown” could not get a better or creepier introduction.

Naturally, the story from there is our group of young heroes battling Pennywise and trying to stay alive, but much like Stephen King’s book, director Muschietti and screenwriters Chase Palmer and Cary Fukunaga, who was going to direct the film before dropping out, do an exceptional job of introducing each of the kids’ obstacles and fears. While these scenes played like filler in the 1990 mini-series, because it’s TV and there are things you can’t do on TV, the movie is filled with genuine horrors and traumas these kids must overcome and that Pennywise uses to great advantage.

Find my full length review in the Geeks Community on Vocal. 

Movie Review Rememory

Rememory (2017) 

Directed by Mark Palansky 

Written by Mark Palansky, Michael Vudakinovich 

Starring Peter Dinklage, Julia Ormond, Anton Yelchin, Henry Ian Cusick 

Release Date August 24th, 2017 

Published August 22nd, 2017 

Rememory wants desperately to be a deep meditation on memory, grief and loss, and a sci-fi mystery. The film achieves some of that goal thanks to the performances from the stellar cast headed by Peter Dinklage and Julia Ormond. That said, the deep meditation part only skims the surface and the sci-fi mystery movie is achieved only through the use of a Deus Xx Machina, a magic memory machine.

Rememory stars Game of Thrones MVP Peter Dinklage as a deeply wounded man coping with the death of his brother in an accident that opens the film. Cut to several years later as Dinklage's Sam Bloom is sitting in the audience of a lecture being given by an acquaintance named Gordon Dunn (Martin Donovan). Dunn has created a remarkable piece of technology that can extract full length memories from human beings.

The nature of this technology is kept mostly under wraps as it is merely the simplistic set-up for a sci-fi detective story wherein Gordon dies under suspicious circumstances and Sam, because he seems to have no job, or family, or life of any kind, dedicates himself to finding Gordon’s killer. What luck then that he can scam Gordon’s grieving widow Carolyn (Julia Ormond) into giving him the chance to steal Gordon’s magic memory machine from his office.

The other side of that story is that Ben hopes to use the machine to recover his memory of the night his brother died in order to collect his brother’s dying words and uncover their meaning, or so he thinks. Meanwhile, Ben’s investigation leads him to three possible suspects, Gordon’s business partner, Robert (Henry Ian Cusick), Gordon’s mistress and patient Wendy (Evelyne Brochu), and Todd (the late Anton Yelchin to whom the film is dedicated), another of Gordon’s patients and the mystery man who visited Gordon on the night he died.

Read my full length review in the Geeks Community on Vocal. 

Classic Movie Review Killer Clowns from Outer Space

Killer Clowns from Outer Space (1988) 

Directed by Stephen Chiodo 

Written by Charles Chiodo, Stephen Chiodo 

Starring Grant Cramer, Suzanne Snyder, John Allen Nelson, Royal Dano, John Vernon 

Release Date May 27th, 1988 

Published May 27th 2018 

The latest adaptation of Stephen King’s IT hits theaters this weekend and with that the Everyone is a Critic podcast needed a clown movie for our classic. Only one movie could fit the bill as a classic movie about clowns: Killer Klowns from Outer Space. This bizarre 1988 horror comedy about murderous, alien Klowns and starring John Allen Nelson and John Vernon both baffles and entertains.

It’s an average night in a southern California suburb where the kids like to gather in spot on the edge of the woods to make out. Two of the kids are our heroes Mike and Debbie, played by Grant Cramer and Suzanne Snyder. When they see a massive light in the sky they go to investigate and find a giant circus tent. The inside is bigger than the outside like circus Tardis and Mike and Debbie stumble upon dead bodies wrapped in cotton candy and eventually gigantic alien clowns with murder in their eyes.

Narrowly escaping the craft, Mike and Debbie go to the police where Debbie’s ex-boyfriend Dave (John Allen Nelson) is a local cop. Dave is skeptical but after encountering one of the Killer Klowns himself, he quickly joins up with Mike and Debbie while the Killer Klowns wrap the townspeople in cotton candy as if they were snacks for a long trip back to their home planet.

Trust me when I tell you that Killer Klowns from Outer Space is even crazier and more fun than my description. It’s a work of remarkable imagination from a pair of brothers who are better known in Hollywood for their puppet work than for having directed this film. In fact, Killer Klowns from Outer Space is the only film directed by brothers Stephen and Charles Chiodo though they have worked consistently in Hollywood for the past 30 years, mostly in puppetry.

That may be due to the fact that Killer Klowns from Outer Space is actually a relatively recent phenomenon. The film was a relative failure upon release but slowly but surely it developed a cult following. It makes sense, anyone in their right mind would dismiss a movie called Killer Klowns from Outer Space as some ludicrous, unwatchable drive-in movie which it most definitely is but I urge you to look closer.

Find my full review in the Geeks Community on Vocal. 

Horror in the 90's Brainscan

Brainscan (1994) 

Directed by John Flynn 

Written by Andrew Kevin Walker 

Starring Edward Furlong, Amy Hargreaves, T. Ryder Smith, Frank Langella 

Release Date April 22nd, 1994 

Published April 29th, 2024 

When I saw that the sci-fi horror movie Brainscan was written by Andrew Kevin Walker, famed screenwriter of David Fincher's Seven and the credited screenwriter on several famous Blacklist screenplays, I got a little excited. Walker is a brilliant, risky, and unpredictable screenwriter with a lurid edge to his work. I went from having exceedingly low expectations to curious and hopeful. Then, I watched Brainscan and my hopes were dashed. It turns out, Andrew Kevin Walker wrote and sold the screenplay seven years before it arrived in theaters as a very, very different movie. 

Brainscan stars Edward Furlong, fresh off his blockbuster role in Terminator 2: Judgment Day, as horror movie junkie, Michael. Michael's life revolves around horror movies. Alongside his best bud forever, Kyle (Jamie Marsh), Michael runs a horror movie club at school. The club has even attracted Michael's crush, his next door neighbor Kimberly (Amy Hargreaves), who we first meet as Michael is spying on her with a telescope as she undresses in front of her bedroom window, which is completely open. This is so the screenwriters can cheat and have dialogue indicating that Kimberly wants Michael to spy on her. 

See, he's not a creep, it's a weird fetish thing. It's totally okay. Not hard to tell that men wrote and directed Brainscan, is it? Anyway, getting past what a little creep Michael is, let's get back to his horror movie obsession. While reading Fangoria Magazine, in a bid for free coverage from the magazine, yay corporate synergy, am I right, anyway, Michael finds an ad for a new CD-Rom horror game called Brainscan. The game promises an immersive experience as you go inside the perspective of a serial murderer as he carries out a murder. 

As the title and plot indicate, Michael orders the game and sets about playing it while his friend's are having a party next door. Once the game begins, the outside world fades away and Michael finds himself inside a stranger's bedroom. There is a knife in his hand and Michael watches helplessly as the man is stabbed to death. We watch everything from the killer's perspective, as if Michael were the killer and we were in Michael's head. Waking up the next morning after playing the game, Michael is deeply disturbed. 

It turns out, spoiler alert: Michael was the one killing this guy. It turns out that the guy who got murdered is from Michael's neighborhood and the cops, headed up by Detective Hayden (Frank Langella) are crawling all over the place. When Michael runs home, having discovered that he was a killer, he encounters the breakout character of 1994, The Trickster (T. Ryder Smith). The Trickster is the host of Brainscan leading Michael through the four stages of gameplay. First up was the murder. Next, Michael has to play the game again if he wants to destroy the evidence that he's the killer. 

Find my full length review on Vocal's Horror Community