Movie Review Honk for Jesus Save Your Soul

Honk for Jesus Save Your Soul (2022) 

Directed by Adamma Ebo 

Written by Adamma Ebo 

Starring Regina Hall, Sterling K. Brown 

Release Date September 3rd, 2022 

In theaters now and streaming for Peacock subscribers

Honk for Jesus Save Your Soul is a deeply confused movie. The film, directed by newcomer Adamma Ebo, stars Regina Hall and Sterling K. Brown as Trinitie and Lee Curtis Childs, the disgraced leaders of a massive mega-church somewhere in the American south. At first, Honk For Jesus Save Your Soul takes on the feel of a Christopher Guest movie about complete un-self aware characters revealing their absurd self-delusions to our gleeful schadenfreude. Then, from time to time, the movie grows deathly serious and as an audience member you are left scratching your head about how the movie intends for you to feel about what you’re watching. 

Context clues slowly reveal that Lee Curtis, behind his bluster and expensive suits, is a closeted gay man. The purported scandal that has seemingly decimated his church occurred when Lee Curtiis may or may not have been getting sexually involved with young male members of the church youth. Portions of Honk for Jesus Save Your Soul show the conniving married couple trying to use their vast wealth to make the scandal go away. Meanwhile, the couple is using the documentary being made about their downfall as a marketing tool to promote the big comeback of their church, much to the chagrin of the unseen documentary filmmaker who claims to only want to tell the truth.

Find my full length review at Geeks.Media, linked here. 

Movie Review Class

Class (2022)

Directed by Nicholas Celozzi 

Written by Nicholas Celozzi 

Starring Anthony Michael Hall, Debbie Gibson, John Kapelos 

The Breakfast Club (1985)

Directed by John Hughes 

Written by John Hughes

Starring Anthony Michael Hall, Molly Ringwald, Paul Gleason

Class stars Debbie Gibson and Anthony Michael Hall in an update of the classic Breakfast Club formula that Hall is inextricably linked to. It’s the story of a detention class in a nondescript modern High School. Gibson plays Miranda, the school drama teacher in charge of the latest detention group. She’s seconded by the hardass School Guidance Counselor, Mr. Faulk (Hall). In Faulk, Hall is playing a role similar to that of Paul Gleason’s far more broad caricature of a guidance counselor in the John Hughes classic. 

I say that Gibson and Hall are the stars but they are really parts of an ensemble and since this is a movie about kids, high school, and detention, it’s the students who are center stage for the movie. Naturally, the kids fall into types, the stoner, the jock, the popular girl, the outcast and so on. There are a couple gender flips and the spectrum of sexual identities are in play, but much like The Breakfast Club, the point of having character types is to subvert those types and break through to the real person beneath.

Find my full length review at Geeks.Media, linked here. 

Movie Review Orphan First Kill

Orphan First Kill

Directed by William Brent Bell 

Written by David Coggeshall 

Starring Isabelle Fuhrman, Rossif Sutherland, Julia Stiles, Hiro Kanagawa 

Release Date August 19th, 2022 

Considering that director William Brent Bell doesn’t have the greatest resume and the first Orphan movie from 2009 wasn’t very good, I wasn’t particularly interested in another Orphan movie. What a fun surprise it was then to find out that Orphan First Kill is a weird ballsy B-movie that embraces camp in the best possible way. Isabelle Fuhrman, on a roll after her exceptional performance in the rowing thriller The Novice, delivers a stunner of a performance against all odds in a prequel to a movie she made as a child. 

Orphan First Kill takes us back to Russia where a new psychiatrist has taken a job at a remote psychiatric facility for the criminally insane. As the woman is being given a tour of the facility we learn that the most dangerous patient in the prison has gone missing. That patient is Leena Klammer and the new young doctor is about to come face to face with her unexpected evil. Leena, for those who don’t know, is 30 years old but looks like an 11 year old innocent child. After nearly killing the newest doctor at the facility, Esther is subdued and taken back to her room.

Find my full length review at Geeks.Media, linked here. 

Movie Review Beast

Beast (2022) 

Directed by Baltasar Kormakur 

Written by Ryan Engle 

Starring Idris Elba, Sharlto Copley, Iyana Halley, Leah Sava Jeffries 

Release Date August 19th, 2022 

Idris Elba punches a lion in the face. Do you need a better reason to see the new action drama Beast? One of the sexiest men in the world comes face to face with a lion in the wilds of South Africa and delivers a knuckle sandwich to one of the Kings of the jungle. The sheer audacity of this sequence, well crafted in CGI, made me a believer in this otherwise mediocre family drama. A father struggles to raise two daughters following the death of their mother and winds up punching a lion in the face in Beast. 

Dr. Nate Samuels (Idris Elba) is a respected doctor but a struggling father. Having watched his marriage dissolve before his eyes, Dr. Samuels appeared content to crawl inside a bottle and coast on the respect he’s earned in his lengthy medical career. This changes when his ex-wife passes away and Dr. Samuels becomes a single dad to his two daughters, Meredith (Iyana Halley) and Norah (Leah Sava Jeffries).

Find my full length review at Geeks.Media, linked here. 

Documentary Review Kaepernick & America

Kaepernick & America (2022) 

Directed by Ross Hockrow, Tommy Walker 

Written by Documentary 

Starring Nate Boyer, Hue Jackson, April Dinwoodie 

Release Date September 2nd, 2022 

As I write this review on September 1st, 2022, it's less than 24 hours since Police in Columbus, Ohio, murdered an unarmed black man in the middle of the night. 20 year old Donovan Lewis was in bed in the apartment he was sharing with two other men. Police came in the middle of the night to execute an arrest warrant on unspecified charges. Two men were removed from the apartment and it was indicated to Police that Lewis remained behind. 

A canine officer, Ricky Anderson, a man with 30 years of experience, was admitted to the scene and informed whoever was behind the closed door of Donovan's bedroom that the dog was to be set loose if this person did not respond. When the door was opened, body camera footage indicated that he barely waited for the dog to move before he'd shot Donovan Lewis. According to the Officer, he saw Lewis had something in his hand. That something was a vape pen.

Find my full length review at Swamp.Media, linked here. 

Movie Review Wire Room

Wire Room (2022)

Directed by Matt Eskanderi

Written by Brandon Stiefer 

Starring Bruce Willis, Kevin Dillon

Release Date September 2nd, 2022

Before I can tackle criticism of the new movie Wire Room starring Bruce Willis I must address the elephant in the room. In previous reviews of the Bruce Willis movies Midnight in the Switchgrass and American Siege, I criticized Willis for appearing disinterested, bored and lazy. Well, since those reviews came out it was revealed that for the past few years Willis has been working through a condition called Aphasia.

Aphasia is a brain injury often associated with head injuries or stroke. It’s unknown when Bruce Willis first became afflicted with aphasia but it was before his recent spate of direct to streaming movies where Willis’ name value is more important than his performance. It’s been since at least 2016 that Willis began showing up in movies that paid him exorbitant amounts of money for glorified cameos. And since 2018 we’ve had rumors of Willis having to be fed lines through an earpiece because he had been unwilling or perhaps unable to read and retain his lines.

Find my full length review at Geeks.Media, linked here. 

Movie Review Surrogate

Surrogate (2022)

Directed by David Willing 

Written by Beth King, David Willing 

Starring Kestie Morassi, Jane Badler 

Release Date September 2nd, 2022 

Surrogate is a movie with good ideas that comes up just a little short in execution. The film stars Kestie Morassie as Natalie Paxton, a nurse with a beautiful young daughter and a mostly happy life. That life gets upended when, while working far from home to pick up some extra money, she's assaulted by a deeply disturbed and ill woman. While attempting to save this woman's life, Natalie becomes infected by whatever this woman has been infected with. Is it a demon? Is it some kind of alien? It's unclear initially. 

Soon after arriving home, Natalie becomes violently ill. Upon waking up, she finds herself covered in blood from the waste down. She goes to the hospital and is told that she has recently given birth. This isn't possible given the state of Natalie's personal life but the doctor and an investigator named Lauren Balmer (Jane Badler) from child and family services, do not believe her. Balmer wants to know what Natalie did with her non-existent baby and she will be most ineffectual for the rest of the movie.

Find my full length review at Horror.Media

Movie Review We Need to Talk About Kevin

We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011) 

Directed by Lynne Ramsey 

Written by Rory Stewart Kinnear, Lynne Ramsey 

Starring Tilda Swinton, Ezra Miller, John C. Reilly 

Release Date October 21st. 2011 

Streaming on Amazon Prime and Tubi

When we chose the movie We Need to Talk About Kevin for our classic on the August 29th edition of the Everyone's a Critic Movie Review Podcast I promise you, we were not intending it as a humorous reference to the current real life troubles of star Ezra Miller. I had honestly forgotten that the troubled star was the title character, Kevin, a sociopath who grows ever more unhinged until he causes an unimaginable tragedy. We Need to Talk About Kevin was chosen because star Tilda Swinton is back in theaters with a brilliant new movie called Three Thousand Years of Longing. 

With that problematic aside noted, lets talk about We Need to Talk About Kevin. The inconceivably brilliant writer-director Lynn Ramsey came to the project after reading author Lionel Schriver's unnerving book and after being approached by then producer of the film Tilda Swinton. It was Ramsey who suggested that Swinton should move from the Producer's chair to the center of this swirling vortex of a story about mother dealing with guilt, anguish, depression, and unceasing grief. Ramsey's instincts, as usual, were on point. Few other actors in the world carry the grace and gravitas that Swinton does.

Find my full length review at Criminal.Media, linked here. 

Movie Review Three Thousand Years of Longing

Three Thousand Years of Longing (2022) 

Directed by George Miller

Written by George Miller, Augusta Gore 

Starring Tilda Swinton, Idris Elba

Release Date August 26th, 2022 

I wish to be in love. I wish to love and be loved. This is not to say I have never been in love or felt the comfort that comes with being loved. I have felt loved all my life by parents, lovers, and friends. On that front, I’ve been lucky. No, my wish is simply to be in love, to feel romance and desire, the excitement of discovery, and that feeling that can only come when two people pledge to only love each other. Marriage? Not necessarily, though I am not opposed to the idea. 

I wish I could tell someone that I love them and they tell me that they love me, in the romantic sense of love, and that I was capable of believing it, embracing it, trusting it to be true. I wish for the kind of certainty of love and romance that, realistically, doesn’t exist in any tangible sense. For me, to love is to trust, to invest who you really are in another person and for them to do in kind. That’s love, it’s a foundation of trust, of wholehearted faith.

Find my full length review at Geeks.Media, linked here. 

Movie Review The Woman King

The Woman King (2022) 

Directed by Gina Prince Blythewood 

Written by Dana Stevens 

Starring Viola Davis, Thuso Mbedu, Lashana Lynch, Sheila Atim, John Boyega 

Release Date September 16th, 2022 

Based on a True Story 

The Woman King is a lightning bolt of a movie, it strikes fast, it's searing, and when it hits you, you won't forget it. Based on the true story of the Agojie Warriors of Dahomey, the film stars Viola Davis as General Nanisca, leader of a group of female warriors ordained by their King, the recently anointed King Ghezo (John Boyega), as the protectors of the kingdom. Under the leadership of General Nanisca, the Agojie train and prepare for war as much as they prepare for defense. Our first look at the General and her warriors in action is a brutal and fast moving fight as the Agojie take over a village in order to free captives from Dahomey. 

This is a clear act of aggression toward the ruling Oya tribe to whom Dahomey has been indebted for years. The Oya have kept a brutal stranglehold over this region of Northern Africa, profiting from selling slaves to Europeans. The Oya practice of conquering villages and selling captives has given the Oya such advances as guns and horses and made them a deathly adversary. Nevertheless, General Nanisca is encouraging her King, King Ghezu, to challenge the Oya and especially to give up the slave trade himself, something he and his kingdom have profited from the Agojie have become a conquering and capturing force.

Find my full length review at Geeks.Media, linked here. 

Classic Movie Review Singles

Singles (1992) 

Directed by Cameron Crowe

Written by Cameron Crowe 

Starring Bridget Fonda, Campbell Scott, Kyra Sedgwick, Matt Dillon 

Release Date September 18th, 1992 

"I was just... nowhere near your neighborhood" - Steve Dunne (Campbell Scott) Singles 

My first conception of romantic love was shaped by Cameron Crowe and the movie Singles. I was 16 years old and, like every 16 year old, I thought I knew everything. I'd had a girlfriend and we had played at what it is like to be an adult couple. But it was just play. We had no actual concept of what we were doing and were far too immature to understand what was at stake when you are toying with emotions and saying 'I love you' without really knowing what that meant. 

Then I saw Singles and I suddenly realized that what I thought was love was just the chaotic lust of being young. I saw a romance on the big screen that made sense to me for the first time. I had the broad strokes idea of what romance was, but far from a whole picture. Then I heard that line, 'I was just nowhere near your neighborhood,' and it clicked for me. The idea of romance and lust, love and reality, all came together in this linear puzzle in my mind. I was still an immature, headstrong child, but Singles had shown me that relationships were more than just make out sessions on a couch and that getting to know someone, struggling with them, meeting them on a truly emotional level, that was the goal, that's where fulfillment was. I've chased that feeling ever since.

Find my full length review at Geeks.Media, linked here. 

Movies of Angelina Jolie

1995 Hackers 

1995 Without Evidence 

1996 Love is All There is 

1996 Foxfire 

1996 Mojave Moon 

1997 Playing God 

1998 Hell's Kitchen 

1998 Playing by Heart 

1999 Pushing Tin 

1999 The Bone Collector 

2000 Girl Interrupted Click here for my review

2000 Gone in 60 Seconds 

2001 Lara Croft: Tomb Raider 

2001 Original Sin 

2002 Life or Something Like It Click here for my review

2003 Lara Croft Tomb Raider The Cradle of Life Click here for my review

2003 Beyond Borders 

2004 Taking Lives Click here for my review 

2004 Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow Click here for my review

2004 Shark Tale 

2004 Alexander Click here for my review

2005 Mr. and Mrs. Smith 

2006 The Good Shepherd Click here for my review

2007 A Mighty Heart Click here for my review

2007 Beowulf Click here for my review

2008 Kung Fu Panda Click here for my review

2008 Changeling Click here for my review

2008 Wanted Click here for my review

2010 Salt Click here for my review 

2010 The Tourist Click here for my review

2011 Kung Fu Panda 2 Click here for my review

2014 Maleficent 

2014 Unbroken Click here for my review

2015 By the Sea 

2016 Kung Fu Panda 3 

2019 Maleficent Mistress of Evil Click here for my review

2020 Come Away 

2020 The One and Only Ivan Click here for my review

2021 Those Who Wish Me Dead 

2021 Eternals Click here for my review

2024 Maria Click here for my review

Movie Review Girl Interrupted

Girl Interrupted (2000) 

Directed by James Mangold 

Written by James Mangold, Lisa Loomer, Anna Hamilton Phelan 

Starring Winona Ryder, Angelina Jolie, Whoopi Goldberg, Brittany Murphy, Elisabeth Moss, Clea Duvall

Release Date January 14th, 2000 

I have seen the movie Girl Interrupted before. I saw it when it was released theatrically in January of 2000. I recall admiring it and new, rising star, Angelina Jolie, who would earn a much deserved Oscar nomination for her work. Thus, it came as quite a shock to me, when I watched the film for the first time since the theatrical release and was shocked at how bad it was. The opening two minutes of Girl Interrupted features one of the most obnoxious movie tropes on the planet. 

Let’s set the scene: Interior some dingy, unused portion of a 1960s mental hospital. Four young women are in the room and it appears that something awful has happened. The scene is narrated by our leading actress, Winona Ryder who delivers this wildly melodramatic voiceover monologue:

“Have you ever confused a dream with life? Or stolen something when you had the cash? Have you ever been blue? Or thought your train was moving while sitting still? Maybe I was just crazy. Maybe it was the 60s.Or maybe I was just a girl… interrupted” Turn to camera, look directly down the lens.

Find my full length review at Geeks.Media, linked here. 

Movie Review Blonde

Blonde (2022)

Directed by Andrew Dominik 

Written by Andrew Dominik 

Starring Ana De Armas, Adrian Brody 

Release Date September 23rd, 2022 

Netflix 

You know what might be nice for us all as a culture? If perhaps we could stop propping up the corpse of Marilyn Monroe for the world to gawk at. Wouldn't that be nice? I realize, for many in Hollywood, especially those at Netflix, profiting off of the life and times of one of the world's most famous people is a cottage industry but it's getting very sad and ugly now and I for one would like to see it come to an end. Really, there is no better ending to this ugly period of Marilyn-sploitation than the deeply troubled and off-putting, Blonde. 

From the reductive and pretentious title to writer-director Andrew Dominik's forceful attempts at artiness, Blonde is a miserable and stultifying film experience. Now, I want to be kind, for a moment, Ana de Armas, is working wonders trying to make this movie work. Sadly, the makers of Blonde are determined to drown de Armas' elegant talent in a lot of visual nonsense while exploiting her naked form as much as possible. Yes, some will argue that exploitation is the point and that Marilyn was THE subject when it comes to the concept of the Male Gaze, but Blonde only pretends toward the idea of examining any ideas related to how men informed the life and demise of Marilyn Monroe.

Find my full length review at Geeks.Media, linked here.