Movie Review Mafia Mamma

Mafia Mamma (2023) 

Directed by Catherine Hardwicke 

Written by Michael J. Feldman, Debbie Jhoon

Starring Toni Collette, Monica Bellucci 

Release Date April 14th, 2023 

Published April 17th, 2023 

There is something just off about Mafia Mamma. This a movie where the lead murders a man by repeatedly jamming her high heel into a man's groin and then his to the point where it's noted that pieces of the man's scrotum were found in his eye socket. And yet, it's also a film that tonally is intended to be a comedy about a woman finding her confidence for the first time, leaving her husband, beating empty-nest syndrome, and seeking the things that maker her happy rather than worrying about others. Not surprisingly, the Girlboss finding her feet story clashes with the scrotum in the eye story. 

Mafia Mamma stars Toni Collette as Kristen, a deeply put-upon working mom. As we join the story, Kristen is fretting over the fact that her beloved son, Domenick (Tommy Rodger) is leaving for college. The empty syndrome is strong with Kristen, she's a mess. It's set to be the first time that she and her musician husband, Paul (Tim Daish) have been alone together in 18 years. Naturally, that won't last as Paul is immediately revealed as cheating on Kristen. He's not gone from the movie but this latest humiliation is the catalyst for the rest of the story. 

Kristen's grandfather was, until recently, the head of an Italian crime family, something Kristen was not aware of. Kristen's mother had escaped the mafia life years earlier and Don Grandpa had allowed this so as to keep Kristen safe from his enemies. Now that he's dead however, the crime family belongs to Kristen. Yes, apparently you can inherit a mafia family. Technically, Kristen has inherited an Italian Vineyard that happens to be a mob front, but regardless. Wanting to escape her cheating husband, Kristen accepts an invitation to her grandfather's funeral. 

At the funeral, Kristen is nearly killed as a rival family aims to take advantage of the Don's death. It will be up to Kristen, under the guidance of her grandfather's consigliere, Bianca (Monica Bellucci) to attempt to broke peace with this other family. To say that Kristen is not prepared to be a Mob leader is the entire comic premise of the film. Kristen works in pharmaceutical sales for her day job so, yeah, being a mob boss is not in her typical skill set. Though one could draw a comparison between Pharmaceutical companies and the Mob, this movie isn't smart enough to make that joke. 

Instead, we watch Kristen compile an accidental body count. Her tete a tete with a fellow mob boss ends in death, I mentioned the scrotum in the eye guy, and there are several more gruesome, bloody deaths and stabbings in Mafia Mamma. The filmmakers appear to want to be true to the reality of this scenario, the idea that Kristen would be a very unlikely and comically underprepared mob boss and the reality that being in the mob is grim and bloody business that very often ends in a lot of death. A lot of gruesome, bloody death. 

Find my full length review at Geeks.Media

Movie Review: Gringa

Gringa (2023) 

Directed by Marny Eng, E.J Foerster 

Written by Patrick Hasburgh 

Starring Steve Zahn, Judy Greer, Jess Gabor, Roselyn Sanchez

Release Date April 21st, 2023 

Published April 18th, 2023 

Gringa stars Jess Gabor as Marge, an awkward teenager struggling in school and on the soccer field. Marge's mom, Margie (Judy Greer), is a busy but not quite successful real estate agent. Though she loves her daughter, the two see little of each other as Margie hustles to give them a life. Everything changes when Margie is killed in a tragic car accident. Facing the prospect of moving to Arizona with her stern and unyielding grandparents, Marge decides to set her own path. 

Having learned that her former soccer star and current deadbeat dad, Jackson (Steve Zahn), is living in a beachfront shack in small village in Mexico, Marge decides to sneak across the border for an impromptu reunion. What she finds is a debauched alcoholic who when he isn't asleep is usually drunk or surfing. Dad also coaches Girl's Soccer in town, an obligation he gave himself in order to win the attention of Elsa (Roselyn Sanchez), a local bar owner, way out of Jackson's league, but who can't fully resist his charm. 

The dramatic father-daughter reunion is sad but also deeply awkward. Neither knows how to take the other. Jackson is sympathetic to the death of Margie, he did love her once, but he's also a stunted man-child so his sympathies only go so far. Marge herself is rightfully bitter toward the father who abandoned her. These early scenes have a strong emotional charge as Jess Gabor and Steve Zahn wrestle with the complicated emotions at play. These are the strongest moments of Gringa. 

Find my full length review at Geeks.Media 

Movie Review Renfield

Renfield (2023) 

Directed by Chris McKay

Written by Ryan Ridley 

Starring Nicolas Cage, Nicholas Hoult, Awkwafina, Ben Schwartz 

Release Date April 14th, 2023 

Published April 13th, 2023 

Nicolas Cage as Dracula. That's the main selling point of the new action-horror-comedy, Renfield. Sure, the title centers on Dracula's 'Familiar,' his super-powered assistant, Renfield, played by Nicholas Hoult, but this is about Cage. You can't hire an actor as flamboyant, brilliant, and charismatic as Cage to play a character as iconic as Count Dracula and expect audiences to care about anything else. And yet, the movie is called Renfield and it is about the journey of Renfield from being enthralled by Dracula to his desire for freedom and becoming a hero. 

Renfield has been at the side of Count Dracula for nearly a decade. Thanks to powers bestowed on him as Dracula's 'Familiar,' Renfield as superhero strength and speed but only after he eats a bug. Eww. These powers give him the ability to stealthily capture victims to deliver to Dracula so that the Count can suck their blood. As the movie explains, several decades ago, Dracula was nearly killed, almost burned alive, until Renfield saved him. This however, left Dracula in a terrible state. He needs a large supply of victims in order to restore himself to full power. 

Now living in the basement of a dilapidated hospital in the outskirts of New Orleans, Renfield's conscience has started to take hold. Instead of innocent victims, Renfield has begun stalking baddies, criminals and just plain jerks as food for his master. One place where he's begun finding victims is in a support group for people in toxic relationships. Renfield has taken to capturing the people that these victims talk about in group and feeding these toxic people to Dracula. Unfortunately, Dracula has sensed Renfield's newfound conscience and demands innocent victims. 

Find my full length review at Geeks.Media 

Movie Review The Pope's Exorcist

The Pope's Exorcist (2023) 

Directed by Julius Avery

Written by Michael Petroni, Evan Spiliotopoulos 

Starring Russell Crowe, Daniel Zovatto, Alex Essoe, Franco Nero 

Release Date April 14th, 2023 

Published April 15th, 2023 

The Pope's Exorcist is a very silly movie that doesn't know it's a very silly movie. That makes it one of my favorite movies of 2023 so far. I love a good unironic bad movie. The makers of The Pope's Exorcist appear to be earnestly attempting to entertain and failing by being as mediocre and misconceived as possible. It's as if we know that the movie is doomed but the people making it are entirely clueless and we can't warn them, we can only marvel at the bad decisions that led them to so earnestly and obviously fail at their intended goal. 

From the moment that star Russell Crowe. now fully into his Orson Welles, Frozen Peas period, sits himself on a little Vespa, The Pope's Exorcist is doomed to induce snarky giggles. Who thought that having him on a scooter for the entire movie was a good idea? From there however, it's all downhill. The Pope's Exorcist appears to have been a failed script for a cop drama that was reworked into being about an exorcist who works for the pope. 

Crowe's Father Amorth is your classic Cop who plays by his own rules, occasionally working outside the law to get his suspect. The Pope, played by Franco Nero, is the Chief who does what he can to keep the heat off of his rogue cop because despite his flaws, he gets the job done. Then there is a Papal Internal Affairs panel that threatens to take away Father Amorth's badge if he doesn't start, I don't know, exorcising demons inside the boundaries of Papal law? Maybe. 

Naturally, the next big case for Father Amorth will put him to his biggest test as he uncovers corruption inside the church. In this case, the truth of the Spanish Inquisition is hidden in the bowels of an Abbey that belongs to a troubled family. Alex Essoe plays a mother of two, a teenager played by Laurel Marsden, and her silent little brother, Henry )Peter DeSouza-Feighoney), who remains deeply traumatized after nearly dying in the accident that killed his father. 

This trauma makes the boy susceptible to a demon when his family moves to this Spanish Abbey with plans to fix it up and flip it. The demon escapes a tomb in the basement, possesses Henry and calls for Father Amorth to fight, but not before he helps introduce another cop movie trope in this not-a-cop movie. Through Henry's possession, we meet a rookie Priest on his first case, Father Esquibel, played by Daniel Zovatto. When he proves to be no match for the demon, he takes on the role of Father Amorth's rookie partner. 

Find my full length review at Geeks.Media

Why is there a Coach YouTube Channel?

There are any number of curious items to be found on God's own internet. Many of those items can be found on YouTube. For example, did you know that the late television series Coach, which aired on ABC for 8 seasons, ending in 1997, now has an 'official' YouTube channel? I bet you didn't know that. Heck, I bet that star Craig T. Nelson and the executives at Disney, proud owners of ABC and by extension, Coach, have no idea that there is an 'Official' Coach YouTube channel. 

I'm putting the word 'official' in quotes because the lack of Disney branding seems to indicate that this is not, in fact, an official channel for this long dead television series. That, plus the fact that the channel claims Jolly ol' England as its home, seems to indicate that this channel is, at the very least, an anomaly in the history of the long forgotten, hardly mourned college football comedy. So perplexed at the existence of this Coach YouTube account, I had to sit down and look at it and purge it from my consciousness on this page, in this very article. 

Despite my obvious snarkiness, I actually grew up watching and enjoying Coach. Craig T. Nelson was never a natural comedian. Rather, he was a perfect straight man, an ideal stalwart in a sea of weirdos. Actors Jerry Van Dyke, brother of Dick Van Dyke, and future Spongebob Squarepants Starfish star, Bill Fagerbakke, would bring him their weirdness and he would react like a normal person who was slowly being driven insane by the bizarre foibles of the people around him. In his personal life he had a strained romantic relationship fraught with the kind of believable relatable personality conflicts you might imagine a Boomer like Coach would have. \

Click here for my full length article. 

Movie Review: The Lost Weekend

The Lost Weekend (1945)

Directed by Billy Wilder

Written by Charles Brackett, Billy Wilder

Starring Ray Milland, Jane Wyman 

Release Date November 29th, 1945

Published April 2nd, 2023 

Billy Wilder's 1945 film The Lost Weekend is the classic on this week's Everyone's a Critic Movie Review Podcast, available wherever you listen to Podcasts. We chose it for the theme of addiction which is also central to the new movie, A Good Person starring Florence Pugh and Morgan Freeman and directed by Zach Braff. Listen to the next Everyone's a Critic Movie Review Podcast where myself and my co-hosts, Bob and Jeff, talk about both of these movies and their unique takes on addiction. 

What do we know about Don Birnam, the main protagonist of Billy Wilder's 1945 drama, The Lost Weekend? He's approximately 32 years old, the age of actor Ray Milland when he made The Lost Weekend. He's a failed writer who lives in New York City. He's been living off of the kindness of his brother Wick (Phillip Terry) since he came to New York as a much younger man. And, most importantly, according to the story playing out, Don Birnam is a borderline suicidal alcoholic. 

Don also has a loving and deeply devoted girlfriend in Helen St. James, played by Jane Wyman. Why she's so devoted to him is a bit of a mystery. He's not a particularly kind or charming man when we meet him. So what is it? Perhaps she sees that he has the potential to be a good man? That's about as far as I can stretch to find a good justification for the kind of devotion Helen demonstrates to Don. She risks everything to save him and he rewards her by seeking other women as a means of seeking his next drink. 

Alcoholism, as conceived by Billy Wilder, is much akin to demonic possession in modern horror movies. The possessed person is crazed and unable to act for themselves. We see occasional glimpses of their real selves but, for the most part, they are controlled by the demon and seeking whatever mystifying goal the demon always fails to spell out. Indeed, in The Lost Weekend, if alcohol were an actual demon, what is its endgame? What does alcohol hope to accomplish? Don's death? 

What does removing Don's agency and responsibility for his actions mean for the story being told? Again, as portrayed by Milland, and directed by Wilder, Don's alcoholism is the result of the demon drink and seemingly not choices made by Don himself. Perhaps the first drinks were his choice but more than a decade into his alcoholism, the addiction Don demonstrates is one where he must consume or die. Milland's wild-eyed mania is that of a man out of control and yet, only he can win back such control over himself. 

The end of The Lost Weekend comes after Don has pawned off Helen's expensive coat to recover a gun he'd pawned off before in order to buy alcohol. He's demonstrated earlier, in an exchange with Helen and Wick, that he had considered suicide and shows them the bullets to a gun he'd pawned in order to buy more booze. With the gun retrieved Don sets about his dark task only to have Helen arrive just in time. As the two struggle, Don's favorite bartender shows up to return his lost typewriter. 

Seeing as fate has interceded, Don gives Helen the gun and takes up his typewriter. Throwing a cigarette into a glass of gin, rendering it undrinkable, Don sits at his typewriter inspired to write down everything that has happened to him in this lost weekend, starting with the scene that opens the movie, a bottle of booze hanging from a rope outside his apartment, a device to hide the booze from the prying eyes of the people who care about him. Thus the circle of The Lost Weekend is closed. 

What is the nature of addiction? What causes one to become addicted to alcohol or drugs? The tools themselves, alcohol are, in part, at fault for having been created to be addicting. We've been sold a bill of goods by those that profit from alcohol that it is our fault if we get addicted to it. But the reality they want us to ignore is that their product is specifically conceived to cause addiction and line the pockets of the companies that make it. 

Putting that aside however, addiction is often related to trauma, whether large or small. In order to numb the pain of a significant trauma someone may choose to drink alcohol as a temporary respite from their emotional pain. Not dealing with the trauma however, only makes it worse and the reliance on alcohol deepens as the unrepaired trauma festers into greater and greater pain. There is also a Pavlovian effect at play as alcohol numbs the emotional pain it tricks the mind. I hurt, I drink alcohol, I hurt less. A cause and effect pattern becomes reinforced in the mind of an addict. 

For Don, the trauma is rather minor in the grand scale of things. He's ashamed that he's failure as a writer. Drinking gives him the confidence to think that he can overcome anything, that he can be the great man he wishes to be. Thus, Don's cause and effect pattern is the pain of self-loathing, drinking alcohol, no more self-loathing. There is also shame. Don is ashamed of living off of the provenance of his brother and ashamed that he can't be the man who Helen thinks he should be. Alcohol cures those two shames as well. 

Is this is a simplistic reading of addiction? Perhaps, but on a base level, it's not wrong. It is perhaps that simplicity that makes The Lost Weekend so memorable and beloved. It offers some relatively simple answers regarding the nature of drinking and addiction. We know why Don drinks and why he would benefit from not drinking and what it takes to get him to see that he needs to stop. It's a rather tidy narrative made less tidy by Don's actions while drunk as a carouser, a beggar, a thief, a man desperate to feed his addiction. 

Find my full length review at Geeks.Media 

Movie Review Cocaine Bear

Cocaine Bear (2023) 

Directed by Elizabeth Banks 

Written by Jimmy Warden

Starring Keri Russell, Margo Martindale, Jesse Tyler Ferguson, Brooklynn Prince, Ray Liotta, O'Shea Jackson, Alden Ehrenreich 

Release Date February 24th, 2023 

Published February 23rd, 2023 

Cocaine Bear makes a very big promise with its bizarre premise and I am happy to say that it mostly lives up to that promise. As directed by the very funny Elizabeth Banks, Cocaine Bear delivers a Black Bear that is, indeed, very high on Cocaine. Being high on cocaine, the Bear becomes highly aggressive, angry, and agitated. Thus, a bear that would normally prefer not to interact with humans becomes a violent, murderous beast, especially if you happen to have some more cocaine on you, this bear loves cocaine. 

The story of Cocaine Bear kicks off with a very funny scene. A man who is clearly high on cocaine is dancing around an airplane and tossing bags filled with cocaine off the plane and into a mountainous area of Georgia. The man plans on letting the plane crash to divert attention from the massive amounts of cocaine being dropped from it, but before he can leap out of the plane to accompany his cargo, the man manages to knock himself unconscious and fall out of the plane to his death. 

This death helps set to the tone for a violent, disturbing and quite funny dark comedy. Once we've established that there is cocaine in the forest and a bear has ingested a lot of it, we watch as disparate groups of people head into the forest, mostly unaware that cocaine has turned a mostly docile bear into a ravenous, cocaine addicted monster. Among our main cast are a pair of children played by Brooklynn Prince and Christian Convery, they're skipping school for an adventure. Hot on their trail is the girl's mother, played by Keri Russell. She's accompanied by Forest Cop played by Margo Martindale and her crush, an animal care advocate played by Jesse Tyler Ferguson. 

Then, there are the drug dealers, out to retrieve their drugs. O'Shea Jackson and Alden Erhenreich are flunkies for a drug dealer, played by Ray Liotta. They are to retrieve the drugs by any means necessary or possibly face the wrath of Columbian drug kingpins. They will be joined unwillingly by a police detective, played by Isaiah Whitlock. The detective has been looking for a way to bust Liotta's drug dealer and he sees getting these bags of cocaine as a chance to put Liotta behind bars. Naturally, they will all come face to face with a bear that is off its face on cocaine and each will be lucky if they manage to get out of the forest intact. 

Find my full length review at Geeks.Media