Movie Review What Happens Later

What Happens Later (2023) 

Directed by Meg Ryan 

Written by Meg Ryan, Steven Dietz, Kirk Lynn

Starring Meg Ryan, David Duchovny 

Release Date November 3rd, 2023 

Published November 6th, 2023 

What Happens Later stars Meg Ryan as Willa and David Duchovny as William or Bill, depending on how well you know him. Some of the time he's known as W. Davis and, by coincidence, Willa's last name is also Davis. Hence they are both W. Davis. This is something that the movie finds adorable though it didn't mean much to me. Regardless, both W. Davis' are in a Midwest airport in the midst of a massive weather event and they are going to be stuck here overnight as the airport shuts down and somehow leaves only them behind. 

That both W. Davis and W. Davis happen to be ex-lovers with a lengthy and notable romantic history from their early 20s in Madison, Wisconsin, is another thing all together. When we meet these adorable travelers each is trying to avoid seeing the other. They recognize each other at different points and each tries to hide from the other without success. When they do connect they will spend the rest of the day connected, bickering back and forth about their past, their present and their future destinations. They will spend the next 24 hours going over their past and revealing things about themselves and how two people can share the same experience and still see what happened entirely different. 

Willa is on her way to Boston from her home in Austin, Texas. On the other hand, Bill is on his way to Austin from his home in Boston. Weird and cute right? Willa claims that she's going to Boston to visit an old friend and perform a cleansing ceremony for her but that's a lie that will be revealed later. Bill is heading to Austin for a meeting with his millennial boss who he cannot understand because the millennial speaks about safe spaces and doesn't like saying no. It's the kind of boomer reductive idea of millennials that has been tired for quite a long time. 

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Classic Movie Review Fearless

Fearless (1993) 

Directed by Peter Weir 

Written by Raphael Yglesias 

Starring Jeff Bridges, Rosie Perez, Isabella Rossellini, Benicio Del Toro 

Release Date October 15th, 1993 

Published November 6th, 2023 

Fearless stars Jeff Bridges as Max Kline, an architect who survives a deadly plane crash. We meet Max just as he's emerging from the smoking hull of the plane, several passengers trailing behind him. He appears stunned but also serenely calm as holds the hand of a child and is carrying a baby. After handing off the child to a first responder, Max goes in search of the mother of the child. After reuniting mother and baby, Max simply wanders off. He doesn't merely leave the side of the mother, he leaves the sight of the crash. 

Fast forward to a hotel for a quick shower and Max is off. We next see him arrive at a home where the woman inside, a married homemaker recognizes him and welcomes him inside briefly. The two are ex-lovers and they share a few memories over lunch. And then, Max is back at his hotel where he's located by authorities who've been trying to account for him since the crash. The airline wants to give Max a free train ride back to his home in San Francisco but Max, unexpectedly insists on flying back, first class. This is despite his having had serious fear of flying prior to having survived this crash. 

Back home we will learn that Max has a wife and son that he no longer appears to care for. Nearly dying has made Max a creature of the moment, a man with no time for anything that isn't his immediate desire. Much to the dismay of his otherwise loving and caring wife, Laura (Isabella Rosselini), Max has no interest in being home. Instead, Max seeks out one of his fellow survivors, Carla (Rosie Perez), with whom he pursues a relationship, mostly friendly, though he does eventually talk about running away with her. 

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Movie Review Quiz Lady

Quiz Lady (2023) 

Directed by Jessica Yu

Written by Jen D'Angelo 

Starring Awkwafina, Sandra Oh, Will Ferrell, Jason Schwartzman, Holland Taylor

Release Date November 3rd, 2023 

Published November 7th, 2023 

Quiz Lady is a curiously boring movie. Despite having a spitfire star in comedian and actor Awkwafina, Quiz Lady sputters and drags its way through a dimwitted plot on the way to an unearned happy ending. As someone who is a huge fan of Awkwafina's work, Quiz Lady is uniquely disappointing. Playing against type as a grumpy, frumpy, afraid of the world shut-in, the typically appealing qualities of Awkwafina are dialed back to nothing. Why would anyone want to make a live wire like Awkwafina into a wet blanket? It makes no sense. 

In Quiz Lady, Awkwafina plays Anne Yum, an office worker who is obsessed with a Jeopardy-style quiz show, Can't Stop the Quiz. Hosted by Terry McTeer, the show became a life preserver for young Anne when her parents broke up. Since then, Anne has never missed an episode. She's memorized the questions, and is so familiar with the trivia and tropes, she can reel off the answers to any question right off the top of her head. No one knows yet that she can do this, she doesn't get out of the house much.

Naturally, that state of affairs will change. Anne's ordered, shut-in, life is upended when her mother goes missing from her nursing home. The disappearance leads to the return home of Anne's tornado of a sister, Jenny (Sandra Oh). Jenny is homeless and jobless, couch-surfing while she waits for what she claims will be a big payout from a lawsuit she filed against a chain restaurant. Jenny is coming home to stay but not long after arriving, she puts her sister on a path to get out of the house. 

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Classic Movie Review Quiz Show

Quiz Show (1994)

Directed by Robert Redford 

Written by Paul Attanasio 

Starring Ralph Fiennes, John Turturro, Rob Morrow, Paul Scofield, Christopher McDonald, David Paymer, Hank Azaria, Martin Scorsese 

Release Date September 14th, 1994 

Published November 7th, 2023 

The erosion of public trust was not simply something that happened as a result of Watergate. The erosion of public trust can be traced to several different historic flashpoints that include such events as the assassination of President Kennedy, the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr, the McCarthy hearings, and, less historically well known but of a similar importance in tracking the erosion of trust between the public and the media, the public and government, and the public and the intelligentsia, is the Quiz Show scandal of the 1950s. 

Director Robert Redford lays out a strong case that the growth of cynicism toward public institutions began not just with the rebellion of the 1960s. It began with a simple Quiz Show called 21. The game was rigged. Though the venerable NBC network and uber-rich sponsor company Geritol, presented the show as a legitimate competition between everyday folks who happened to be remarkably well versed at memorizing facts, the shows were, in fact, scripted so that certain people would win. When ratings started to fall, that person would lose and be replaced by someone who might raise the ratings once more. 

It's a deeply cynical approach but, one that enthralled an America that was very early into the honeymoon phase when it came to television. It was an innocent time when people wanted to believe they could trust the people whose faces were beamed into their home everyday. People like Jack Berry (Christopher McDonald), the well dressed and affable host of 21 carried a public trust, not unlike a newsman. His integrity and that of the show mattered to the public. The show even played that integrity as a marketing gimmick. 

In the opening moments of Quiz Show we open on a bank where a safe deposit box is being opened. Armed guards remove a package. One guard passes the package to another who climbs inside of an armored car. That armored car then receives a police escort to 30 Rockefeller Center, the television home of NBC and the Quiz Show 21. Inside the package being carried, again, by armed guards, are the vaunted questions, a guarded secret even from host Jack Berry. 21 traded on the supposed integrity of the game. 

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Movie Review Freelance

Freelance (2023)

Directed by Pierre Morel 

Written by Jacob Lentz

Starring John Cena, Alison Brie, Martin Csokas, Christian Slater, Juan Pablo Rana

Release Date October 27th, 2023 

Published October 30th, 2023

Freelance stars John Cena as an ex-special forces military man turned suburban-lawyer-dad. Miserable, and on the verge of divorce from his wife, played by Alice Eve, Cena's Mason Pettits' decides to re-enter the world of military security. With the help of his friend, played by Christian Slater, who Wikipedia credits as 'Mason's Boss,' Cena gets a 5 figure paycheck for what should be a cakewalk of a security job. Mason will accompany a disgraced journalist, Claire Wellington (Alison Brie), to some made up South American dictatorship and keep her safe while she interviews the legendary dictator Juan Venegas (Juan Pablo Rana). 

Venegas hasn't given an interview in 10 years and he hopes that this interview will allow him to show how his country is changing. Meanwhile, Mason is no stranger to this country. He was here some 10 years earlier when he and a few fellow soldiers were nearly killed doing a mission. Naturally, Mason assumes it was the dictator who killed several of his fellow soldiers so his role here is a little tense. He has a grudge against Venegas and now he will be in close proximity to him. And hilariousness ensues. 

Oh how I wish hilariousness would ensue. Freelance is a witless action comedy of a very stale variety. If you cannot predict every beat of this deeply derivative movie you have either never seen a movie before or you are just not paying attention. There is nothing remotely original or interesting in Freelance. Bad guys try to overthrow the government, Cena ends up protecting not only the journalist but also the dictator he hates. But surprise, the dictator isn't a bad guy. Indeed, it wasn't even him who ordered Cena's helicopter to be shot down 10 years ago. 

You might be thinking that here is where Christian Slater's character comes back but no. Instead, the movie employs Martin Csokas as the bad guy. Csokas is all sneering malevolence and zero fun as the leader of a rival mercenary gang. Freelance has some grand ambition of being about South American resources being stolen by corporate interests via private armies but it lacks conviction on the issue. The filmmakers simultaneously want credit for mentioning corrupt corporations while also defending the idea of private military contractors as being nothing but heroes picking up paychecks that may or may not be covered in the blood of the oppressed. 

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Movie Review Showdown at the Grand

Showdown at the Grand (2023) 

Directed by Orson Oblowitz 

Written by Orson Oblowitz 

Starring Terrence Howard, John Savage, Amanda Righetti, Dolph Lundgren, Piper Curda 

Release Date November 10th, 2023 

Published ? 

An evil developer threatens a beloved old movie palace in the new action thriller, Showdown at the Grand. It's an old trope and it's perfectly fitting for this old school B-Movie. Written and directed by Orson Oblowitz, Showdown at the Grand celebrates classic B-Movies while embodying all of the things we love about classic B-Movies. It's a wonderfully meta-action flick with a big beating heart and deep love for the kind of drive-in classics that made cult heroes of Roger Corman, Russ, and stars like Ken Foree and Shannon Tweed. 

Showdown at the Grand stars Terrence Howard as George Fuller, the solo proprietor of the Warner Grand Theater, a southwestern staple of B-movie presentations. Fuller has grown up at the Grand, inheriting the business from his father who sank the family's entire fortune into rescuing the Grand after George's uncle nearly ran it into the ground. Now, George is facing a reckoning of his own. A wealthy and duplicitous developer named Lynn (Amanda Righetti), is buying up properties around the Grand but she needs the land where the grand stands to complete her development. 

Aiding Lynn in her hostile takeover of the area are a pair of thugs, Reed (Mike Ferguson) and Burton (Jon Sklaroff). Burton, though he is purely malevolent, happens to be a fan of the Grand, matching George movie quote for movie quote during their multiple encounters. That won't stop Burton from trying to kill George and destroy the Grand. Standing alongside George and the Grand are his longtime best friend, Lucky (John Savage) and George's only employee Spike (Piper Curda). 

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Documentary Review Holy Frit

Holy Frit (2023) 

Directed by Justin S. Monroe 

Written by Justin S. Monroe, Ryan M. Fritsche, Gillian Fritsche 

Starring Tim Carey, Narcissus Quagliata 

Release Date November 10th in Los Angeles, California 

Published October 28th, 2023 

"In your gut, how think the window is going to turn out?" the director asks artist Tim Cary. Cary responds "I don't really trust my gut about anything." And that's the arc of Tim Cary in Holy Frit, a man who will have to learn to trust his gut and make gut wrenching decisions about his art, his massive multi-million dollar stained glass piece, and the future of his career and family. None of these decisions has an obvious answer and Tim is going to be forced to trust his choices are right without knowing what the outcome will be, trusting the gut, the instinct, as he's not done before. 

What is Frit? That is probably the first question anyone would ask, based on the title of the documentary, but it's not that special, in and of itself and the answer is passed on to us in passing. Frit is very small pieces of broken glass. Frit is the innovation of an artist named Narcissus Quagliata, a larger than life personality who innovated in the world of glass art in a way that no one had before. I can't tell you exactly how Frit works, but when dusted onto other forms of stained glass, it creates a remarkably colorful design, unlike anything you've seen before. 

The fact that Tim Cary had never worked with Frit before when he pitched his employer, Judson Stained Glass, as the company to create a 4000 square foot stained glass window for a Kansas City Mega church is just one absurd fact about how this massive stained glass work of art came to be. Judson didn't have the technique, the staff, or the space to do a project as massive as a 4000 square foot stained glass window. Oh, and the design that Tim Cary pitched to the church, is the kind of design that, at the moment he pitched it, didn't appear to be possible. 

Find my full length review at Geeks.Media