20 Years of Movie Reviews

On September 21, 2005, I attempted to post a comment on Rotten Tomatoes for a movie called “The 40-Year-Old Virgin”. I didn’t know what I was doing and ended up accidentally creating an account that included a blog. Since I was seeing several movies a month in theaters and was reading Roger Ebert religiously, I started to write movie reviews. In or around October 2010, I forgot the password for my RottenTomatoes account and couldn’t retrieve it because I no longer had access to my college email. So I copied the posts and moved to Blogger, which as of this writing, is still a thing that exists. About that time, I wrote the blurb “A Guide to this Blog” which is now dated and preserved right below. In the spirit of preserving a record of thought, this Guide Update will not fully replace it.

I am writing this in September 2025. So twenty years have passed since I started writing movie reviews. I think it is appropriate at this time to reflect on what that means and what, if anything, has been learned from the experience. And really, more than that, something else needs to be addressed here: the fact that very very few people read this blog. It has never had more than ten followers and I think those people stopped actually following it a long long time ago.

What is the utility of writing about movies? When I think of this question, I go back to the first couple chapters of Fever Pitch, a novel by Nick Horby. That book was about a football obsessive (European football, Arsenal respectively) who was trying to justify the depths of his fandom. One of the things he pointed out was that knowledge about the most recent football scores was a social boon. He reported that upon commencing any new social situation (school, job, anything really), all he had to do was study the morning sports page and he would have something he could talk about with the most random of strangers (as long as they were men of course). A similar insight was proffered in the Billy Crystal movie City Slickers. A trio of men are queried by a woman as to what utility there is to knowing sports trivia. In response, the movie utilized its special ability to throw off a joke before delving into deeper, more emotional territory. The joke I will not give away, but after it is told, one of the men describes his strained relationship with his father and how when he was growing up they got into a lot of arguments and had trouble seeing eye-to-eye on many issues. But, he notes, we could always talk about baseball.

But what about movies? Unlike sports, it is impossible to talk about movies (or art in general) on a purely trivial basis the way one can and does discuss sports. When you form an opinion about a movie, you necessarily infer something about your tastes and personality. Importantly, you are not talking about yourself, but you are there, somewhere, in a way that you aren’t in a conversation about sports. The more pronounced and articulate your opinion is, the more of yourself is revealed. The very act of laughing at a joke reveals that you already knew the truth of it (that is, the part you “get” without it explicitly being stated). Indeed, what makes a movie review something different from a movie’s IMDB page is the movie reviewer, who as Roger Ebert succinctly put it, is telling a story about a person who watched a movie.

It is perhaps easier to describe the social abuses of watching an above average amount of movies then the social utility of the same. I think this is ably demonstrated in Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris whereupon the main character (Owen Wilson) knows as much about the 1920’s Lost Generation in Paris as the antagonist (Michael Sheen), but only the latter uses that information in social situations, and they do so to demonstrate superiority, as if the act of acquiring knowledge (or credentials) made a person more intelligent. There is a rank snobbery amongst movie reviewers that dismays those of us that want other people to actually experience good movies. I have seen almost half of the 1001 Movies You Need to See Before You Die and can report that a lot of the earlier movies are relatively bad. This should be expected if one considers that nobody really knew what they were doing in the first thirty years of movie history. It is kind of amazing when you see a movie that actually works from this time period (I recommend Buster Keaton, Alfred Hitchcock, Citizen Kane). With this common sense approach, beware of any movie reviewer that argues the best movies ever made are in black and white. They probably make their declaration with ulterior motives. They either presume that you will never watch the movies they are talking about, or if you do, you’ll just assume you are too stupid to appreciate these old movies. Or, and this is a distinct possibility too, they just have poor taste. I mean, there are people, tenured professors especially, who swear by Soviet cinema. And you can take my word for it, everything the communists have ever produced is mindless trash. The Man with a Movie Camera from 1929 is not the 9th Best Movie Ever Made (as reported by Sight and Sound's famous best movie poll). You don’t need to see it at all and certainly not before watching a thousand other better movies. Watch Baraka instead if you want to look at compelling things without the distraction of narrative.

Given that a knowledge of movies is routinely weaponized by insufferable snobs against the general public, what again is the utility of having a deep knowledge of movies. After all, if you paraded it, you may be mistaken for (and just might be) an insufferable snob. The same problem occurs to the person who reads an above-average number of books. Honestly, I don’t know. I’m not sure that a deep knowledge of movies/books/albums has a social utility. Watching old movies, reading books, writing movie reviews: these are all solitary activities. You do them alone. Frankly, I got into watching a lot of movies because I didn’t have many friends and lived in a socially isolated place. The more extensive my social life becomes, the less movies I see each year.

I am reminded of Roger Ebert’s promise in his foreward to his Great Movies book, “The way to know more about anything, is to deepen your experience of it. I have no way of proving it, but I would bet you a shiny new dime that it is impossible to experience the films in this book without becoming a more interesting person - to yourself anyway.” Looking back, I think that last caveat “to yourself anyway” is important. Because regardless of whether the outside world gives you credit for it, experiencing great art indeed changes one’s inner life. I recall reading Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities and feeling like my brain was expanding. I have spent a lifetime trying to get other people to read that book and have yet to be able to have an extended conversation with anyone else who has read it. Even so, I state now emphatically, that reading it was not a waste of my time.

There is a further utility in not just watching movies, but writing about them. This insight I first read in the autobiographical The Education of Henry Adams. The author noted that as he started his career as a professional writer, he noticed a difference in how he experienced those subjects he knew that he was going to write about. I can confirm this. When watching a movie that I know I will write a movie review about, I know that I am more focused on what is happening on the screen. And with the more movie reviews I have written, the more I actively think about what I am watching. Watching movies/television is a passive experience. Writing about them is an active experience, and that activity bleeds into the passive act of watching.

This is true for regular life. The writer, confronted with a life experience that he knows he will write about, must actively think about how it should be expressed into words on a page. Again, the social utility of this is still unknown to me. I can report though that this hobby of writing about movies has helped me as an attorney. The practice of studying narrative on the screen and writing about it in a blog, if not directly applicable, hones similar skills that a litigator uses to convince his audience: judge, jury, adversary, client. The format and professionalism of a lawyers’ work and attire are like the lighting, audio, and production design of a movie. You don’t really notice them unless they are not performed competently. And when you do notice them, you can’t think of anything else (i.e. the story and/or the legal argument). I’ve listened to countless audio commentaries and these are instructive because what is usually talked about is not the high-falutin theoretical philosophies of movie critics. Mostly the commentators talk about showing up and doing a job. It is illuminating to hear “great directors” talk as if they were just normal people who try hard and care.

For this reason alone, even if no-one ever reads another blog post, I presently plan to write this movie review blog indefinitely. I may have not made a cent off this publication, but I most certainly have become a better writer through the practice of it and especially during those years I was not gainfully employed 2011-2015 in substantive lawyer work. That in turn has made me a lot of money as an attorney. Money is important to happiness and is most rewarding when you earn it. Indeed, I cannot imagine the attainment of my main sources of happiness: my marriage, my growing family, or my residence in New York City without the help of money and the ability to make more of it. I make a point of this because it is said so little it may no longer count as common sense. Tell it to all the young people you know. They will thank you for the wisdom later.

Interestingly, the only thing that would probably stop me from continuing this blog is the event of its unlikely success. That is, for some reason, it became popular. I shudder to think of hordes of random people leaving their mental droppings in the comments section. Indeed if I ever became famous for any reason, there is potential for someone to mine these pages for the purpose of publicly shaming me. There is twenty years of material here (and I can think of several specific examples) so it is inevitable that there's something for people to dislike. It is the continuing policy of this blog to not take anything down, since the most interesting thing about it is the progression of thought over time. But this policy kind of depends on the convenience of no one actually taking the time to read the thing. I don’t owe you people shit. If this ever comes back to bite me, I will take it off the internet. I will continue writing, it just won’t be public.

But to end on a realistic note, such scenarios and defensive declarations are an act of vanity, the same arrogance told of in my 2010 Guide to a Blog. I enjoy writing them and that is why they are here, but at the same time, I hold the following truth as a token of well-earned wisdom: That people are generally concerned with themselves and that their thoughts towards others and yourself are fleeting. Once you no longer see the world as a conspiracy of mean girls, you have indeed graduated from high school. Even great movies, if no one remembers them, have little cultural impact. This becomes obvious whenever a movie critic suggests a movie's worth is determined by its influence, i.e. the credit it deserves for doing something for the first time. Most likely, that movie critic simply has not seen all the older movies that did that "first thing" first. And so it goes. All things must pass.

Happy Gilmore 2 (3/5 Stars)

For those of us with memories of the 1980s and 1990s before streaming and really before the advent of Netflix DVDs, one’s experience of movies was influenced by what was a relatively limited supply. You either saw a movie in the theater, when it was on television cut up and divided by advertisements, or by renting/buying VHS. You generally bought less VHS movies then you rented, so you probably had a fairly limited number of movies that you could watch at will. As a result, those movies in your possession, well, you watched them alot. We watched Jurassic Park so much that my little brother (toddler age) would go around the house pretending he was a dinosaur. Happy Gilmore was another one of those movies that we had on VHS. I watched that movie many times, which clued me in on a lot of the call-backs in the sequel.

I like the sequel well enough and want to state that upfront because given how the rest of this review will go, I don’t want the reader to get the sense that I didn’t like the movie. The fact is, I like Adam Sandler and have no qualms with his type of comedy. I have no problem admitting that. The problem I have with him is that, well, the opportunity to turn in a superior product is there provided he just puts a little more effort into it. Everyone once in a while he does, and you get a glimpse of what he can do. But too often he doesn’t, and you leave a little disappointed and wonder what it would take to make him care enough to suffer just a little (just a little!) for his art.

Happy Gilmore, being a movie made before Sandler was an established star, does not have some of his trademark fat and happy bullshit. There isn’t an over-reliance on cameos by celebrities, mainly because celebrities wouldn’t have been drawn to the production of a relatively unknown comedian. There isn’t an overreliance on weirdos that Sandler, well ensconced in normality, merely chuckles and rolls his eyes at. In Happy Gilmore, Sandler is the odd man out, an unaccomplished hockey player who spills his rage onto polite golf courses. And Happy Gilmore has a particularly good antagonist, Shooter McGavin, (played by Christopher McDonald at his 1990s peak) who inhabits not only the smug country club class that looks down on the blue collar Gilmore, but also inhabits the critic that looks down on Sandler’s type of comedy. There is a sense of entitlement to McGavin that is earned. He has paid his dues, worked really hard, and is at the top of his game. He wants and (probably deserves) that gold jacket. And then Happy Gilmore comes over with a scientifically bullshit long drive. No doubt there were established comedians who looked upon Sandler’s comedy and his inexplicable success in the same way. Here was a guy who would go on the SNL Weekend Update Desk with characters such as Opera-Man (a Man who Sang Opera) and a guy with last-minute Halloween Costume Ideas (i.e. Sandler gives a big grin, calls himself Smiley-Man, and asks for candy) and somehow got consistent laughs. And then he became a big movie star. It feels unfair and McGavin, in one way or another, represents all of us who don’t find this sort of thing funny.

The sequel’s plot is derivative of the first. It should be mentioned that it feels that way on purpose in order to capitalize on nostalgia, not simply out of a lack of creativity. Gilmore kills his wife with an errant golf drive (a similar joke occurs in the first movie when Gilmore kills with his father with a slap-shot at a hockey game) and Gilmore gives up golf and starts drinking. Along the way he loses all his money because someone he beats up sues him for assault and battery (why didn’t anybody else think of that?), so now he needs money to support his daughter’s higher education bill. Hung over and desperate, he turns back to golf.

In the first movie, he was trying to buy back his grandmother’s house from foreclosure, which is a relatively good reason to raise money. Here, his daughter (Sandler’s actual daughter in a cameo) is a talented ballerina whose teacher recommends sending her to Paris Ballet College which costs $75,000 in tuition a year. That is a relatively stupid reason to raise money. With $300,000, you don’t need to go to a fancy school to establish your career. Just start your own company and fund your own shows. (Adam Sandler and Tim Herlihy, writers of the original are back as the writers of the sequel, except now thirty years of making Sandler comedies, I bet they are much richer than they were. That might explain this out-of-touch premise). What is better is Sandler’s four idiot sons who take after their dad. They are much funnier and are gainfully employed with careers that didn’t drive their parents into six figures of higher education debt.

After many decently funny montages in which Happy Gilmore realizes his lost golf game (getting sober helps), he attends a gold jacket dinner which epitomizes one of the problems with sequels to successful comedies in general. This dinner is attended by many many actual golf legends who sit there content to get credit for being themselves. Comedy is better told from the outside and though the makers of the sequel may pat themselves on the back for having the type of pull that gets Jack Nicklaus' onscreen participation, it doesn’t make the movie any funnier.

The golf world has a problem which has provoked this dinner of gold jackets. There is a new startup league called Maxi-Golf which promises to make golf more exciting. This gives the movie the convenience of defending traditional golf (now that Sandler is a secure incumbent) while also making the climax of the movie far more cinematic than traditional golf (i.e. the competition takes place in the new and exciting golf tournament space). One of the new Maxi-golfers carries around a working chainsaw as part of his persona. The only thing missing is Norm Macdonald as a commentator musing that it is Ridiculous.

Cameos are one thing. The movie includes such non-Hollywood types as Travis Kelce (football player) and a host of musicians in small roles (Bad Bunny, Post Malone, and Eminem). These are generally neutral developments though I did like Eminem’s short bit a decent amount. What is actively detrimental to the movie is the re-telling of jokes from the original movie. This clearly is purposeful, the movie wants you to remember the old movie for nostalgia purposes, but it is antithetical to comedy, which abhors the telling of the same joke twice.

The frustrating thing is that the movie doesn’t really have to rely on these nostalgia traps. It has enough new things to explore, and with a little more effort could have explored them more. Here are two story ideas that would have helped the movie: 1) It is revealed that Shooter McGavin has spent the last 30 years in a mental institution because he couldn’t get over the events of the first movie. Why? Wouldn’t it be funnier if Shooter McGavin had spent the last 30 years trying but continually failing to win a gold jacket for various reasons? 2) It is revealed that the Maxi-Golf people are enhancing their golfers via experimental surgery which enables longer drives. Why not reveal that Happy Gilmore suffered a hockey injury way back in the day that had the same effect? That would go a long way in justifying his unscientific golf drive. And it would bring up a conflict about what truly counts as performance enhancement that is natural as opposed to deliberate.

The movie is good enough to the point where I can see these improvements as possibilities of where it could have gone had it put in the effort. But the movie is just content enough to be mediocre, to get all of Adam Sandler’s friends onscreen and paid, and to have several obvious product placements before Sandler moves onto the next film. You could say this about Adam Sandler’s career in general. Every five or six years, he shows us how good he can be, which is why the vast majority of his work product, which revels in mediocrity, is such a continual disappointment. If only this movie could have positioned Shooter McGavin in such a way that the main conflict was a comment on Sandler's career, just like it was in the original movie. If only.

Eddington (4/5 Stars)

There is an old story, I believe I heard it first in the documentary “An Inconvenient Truth”, if you put a frog into a pot of boiling water, it will immediately sense the danger and jump out to escape. If you put a frog into a pot of tepid water, and slowly bring up the temperature, the frog will sink into a languid stupor and unresistingly allow itself to be boiled to death.

In preparation for this review, I looked up that story on Wikipedia to see if it was true or not. I thought it may be a good metaphor to bring up in a review of Eddington. But apparently, at least according to Wikipedia, it isn’t true. In fact, it could not be further from the truth. Instead, Wikipedia cites more modern day scientists who argue that a frog placed in tepid water that is gradually heated will notice the increase in temperature and almost certainly try to escape, whereas a frog that is placed in boiling water will very likely die immediately before it can escape.

Somehow, the fact that this widely known metaphor is completely wrong makes it an even better metaphor to bring up in a review of Eddington. I mean, I saw it first in An Inconvenient Truth wherein Al Gore used it to shame people’s supposed ignorance of the science behind global warming. You think Al Gore would have fact checked that part. And if Wikipedia is wrong and you can boil a frog by slow and steady manipulation, that too would be a good metaphor for Eddington, which is about the small rural town of Eddington, New Mexico where everybody and nobody seems to know what is going on and is very angry about it.

There is a general lag in what goes on in the world and what shows up in movies. Unlike television shows or other media that have production timelines which allow it to be topical, it takes a relatively long time for a movie to be greenlit, produced, edited, and then released. I believe Eddington would be the first movie that takes place in the time of COVID-19 (Spring and Summer 2020) and is specifically about what was happening during that time. And boy does this movie have everything, and how. Mask mandates, Black Lives Matter, bitcoin, false flag conspiracies, pedophilia conspiracies, Antifa, etc., all of which is experienced within the context of forced social isolation. Never have I seen a movie with so much social media doomscrolling.

Because of certain coincidences, COVID-19 had less of a dramatic impact on my life than the rest of the country. I had not taken a vacation in a long time and both deserved and could afford an elongated one. I had just married my wife and was literally in the honeymoon phase of the same. We did not yet have any kids that could be kept home from school. Heck, I never even worked from home. All the other companies in our shared office space evacuated, so my law firm just spaced itself out and I biked to work instead of taking the subway. I dipped into my savings, finished my last screenplay, read War and Peace, and played a lot of Dungeons and Dragons on Zoom.

Still, I had the vague sense that although the restrictions that were put into place in New York City made sense in New York City (after all, in March 2020, NYC experienced a very real surge in hospitalizations, the numbers of which inferred that hundreds of thousands of cases were going unreported), I did wonder whether it made sense to replicate those restrictions in the rest of the country. After all, why would you impose the same Spring 2020 lockdown in relatively dense New York City, which had experienced hundreds of thousands of cases, in relatively spaced-out Houston, Texas which maybe had hundreds of cases, if that.

Eddington takes place in a small town of the same name in New Mexico. In May 2020, the mayor (played by Pedro Pascal) has decided to lockdown the city, mandate masks and six feet of separation. There is not a single COVID-19 case in the entire county. This seems crazier to some people than others. The sheriff Joe Cross (played by Joaquin Phoenix) suffers from asthma and cannot breath in a mask. He openly wonders why he is being directed to wear one while he is alone in his car. There are some attempts at reasonable discussions, but these attempts are thwarted by actors on both sides recording everything on their smartphones. The practical effect of parties filming an argument/negotiation is that it removes the possibility of an engaged discussion. After all, the speaker is not interested in whether the other participant is listening. Instead, they are making a speech to their social media followers. The problem is one more removed than people not listening to each other. In effect, no one is even talking in the first place as the arguments are ranted into the social media ether. It is like the environment of Cable News has descended upon and engulfed the interactions of regular people. After a disappointing exchange with the mayor, Joe Cross decides to throw his hat in the ring for the upcoming mayoral election. He announces his candidacy on Instagram.

Then George Floyd was murdered and the idiocy of COVID-19 was amplified by galling hypocrisy. I certainly remember being informed many times about that notorious 1918 Parade in Philadelphia that kept on being cited as a prime example for why everyone should stay inside and avoid outside crowds in a pandemic. That analogy was completely forgotten in a space of day when it suddenly became okay to have large outside demonstrations. It was a huge gamble in public safety that browbeaten and timid health officials had no balls to criticize. But then we learned that it wasn’t actually a big deal. Large outside gatherings did not lead to a spike in COVID-19 cases. That was reality. So why then were the public officials who okayed the demonstrations still shaming people into staying inside and wearing masks. The lockdowns and school closings just went on forever.

Eddington is notable in that Ari Aster doesn’t appear to be putting too much of the blame on either side of the political polarization. Indeed, it does not appear that Ari Aster is interested in the politics of the period. What interests him about the COVID-19 pandemic is what interests him as a director of great horror movies (Heriditary, Midsommar, and Beau is Afraid). There is an extreme of human emotions in his films that reminds one of Scorsese and a gleefulness in purposefully triggering such emotions that reminds one of Hitchcock. Ari Aster has taken the trauma of the pandemic and has exploited it into yet another emotionally manipulative (i.e. frightening) movie. That bastard, he is arguably the best director to come onto the scene in the past 10 years.

The location of the movie is important. And to someone like me who believes that the nationalization of politics is an exceptionally bad thing, Eddington is instructive to that end. Eddington, the place, does not have a COVID-19 problem and yet the streets are locked down and masks are mandated because of what is happening in New York City. Eddington, the place, does not have a police brutality problem and yet street protests erupt which naturally morph into rioting because of what is happening in Minnesota. The citizens of Eddington have gathered on the streets to yell at each other over issues that do not affect or concern their community. What a nightmare.

About halfway through the movie, Joe Cross is visited at his home by some kind of nutty preacher (played by Austin Butler) who tells him of a story about being an orphan, getting kidnapped by a society of super-rich weirdos in Northern California (sounds like the Bohemian Grove), and being hunted down in the woods as part of some rich super-rich weirdo game. Joe’s wife (played by Amy Adams) brought this guy home for dinner and takes him seriously. You want Joe to explain to the guy that he is nuts, but how is that possible when the world is so crazy. I was thinking about that frog that gets slowly boiled to death without realizing it. Extremism on one side breeds extremism on the other. When neither side has a stable ground to make a sound argument from, it is impossible to defend reason. And no, simply arguing that you support science or scientific authorities is not a replacement for actually understanding the scientific basis of something.

I am 38 turning 39, and I look back on my youth and thank my lucky stars that there was no social media. There are next to no pictures of me in grade school and high school and those that exist cannot be found online. Facebook came to my college in my Freshman year, but more importantly, the Facebook wall wasn’t implemented until,, I think, after I graduated. That Facebook wall, it is an evil thing. It makes it seem like every last thing you have ever posted has the thought and attention paid to it as if you decided to publish it in an established newspaper. It doesn’t even allow you to slur your words so that everyone knows you were drunk when you posted. This is an important thing in real life interactions that is sorely missing in online communications.

Eddington has several teenage characters and I shudder to think that there was in actuality a generation of kids that lived through COVID-19 that went through a very important stage in their social development almost entirely online (or in gatherings on the remote edge of town where they illegally gathered to drink sad beers). At one point, one sorry boy (who reminds me of J.D. Vance for some reason) tries to explain to his parents what the goals of Anti-Racism are and why they are important. This releases the largest laugh of the movie when, after a comic pause, his father erupts: “Are you fucking retarded? What the fuck are you talking about? You’re white!” If you know a kid that went through that phase, try not to hold them to it or remind them of that period of time. They were just trying to fit in.

In Ari Aster’s last movie, Beau is Afraid, I wondered what the movie would be like if Ari Aster had tried to land the plane and not pulled up at the last second for his ending. I think it is fair to say that in Eddington, he does not pull up and that the landing is not successful. This movie crashes and burns in spectacular fashion. Playing it safe may have just resulted in Joe Cross being hospitalized and dying of COVID-19. Instead, Antifa gets involved and the streets of the town experience a hail of machine gun fire.

There is something else not really mentioned here. The movie begins and ends with a conspiracy that is just hinted at. It includes a tech giant that wants to build a large data center right outside of town, which may or may not guzzle up the town’s limited supply of water and energy. This is a local issue that actually affects the residents of Eddington. And yet, there isn’t much controversy about it as the citizens' attention spans are being focused on national problems elsewhere. Indeed, and I am just theorizing here, Mayor Garcia may have locked down the town when he did because he wanted to avoid a civic discussion that would inhibit his ability to push through the development. Is that what the community leaders were discussing in Mayor Garcia’s empty bar that one night when this whole thing started?

Friendship (3/5 Stars)

Sometimes, as the iron is hot, it is best to strike it, whether you are ready or not, lest the opportunity pass you by. Tim Robinson is on the upswing. His sketch comedy show “I Think You Should Leave” is one of the best shows of the last five years. Given his success, now is the time for him to move onto bigger things, like a full scale movie. And given that he specializes in portraying a type of socially catastrophic middle aged man, someone had the bright idea to conceive of a movie in which he strikes up a friendship with the “I Love You, Man” middle aged man himself, Paul Rudd, whose comedic reputation is of the exact opposite nature. At the very least it should make for a great marketing campaign.

There is so much potential here that I kind of wish that someone had done just another rewrite of the script before they had jumped into it. This movie should be very good. Instead it is mediocre and the laughs are sparse. There are plenty of good moments, but too many of them are throwaway. The main problem is that an integral part of the storyline doesn’t quite make sense and so the movie is never truly grounded in reality. If the story does not have a base level of reality, it is hard to build jokes on top of it.

For those unacquainted with “I Think You Should Leave”, it may as well be the present vanguard of comedy. There is something special and new about what is going on in that show. If I were to pick one particular sketch to illustrate what is ground-breaking about it would be the “Haunted House Tour” in which the Tim Robinson character, after being informed that this was the “adult” tour that takes place after 10pm, decides to ask a bunch vulgar questions because, and this is important, he thinks that cursing is the socially acceptable thing to do in an “adult” tour. It is hard to describe and I think you should just watch it. But the main development comedically is the context. As a millennial, I grew up in a place and time where vulgarity was met with shock, and that shock value was funny. For the longest time, comedians seemed to be on an unending and ever more predictable quest to top themselves in vulgarity, a comedic strategy which sometime between There’s Something About Mary and Stepbrothers experienced diminishing returns. In the “Haunted House Tour” sketch, the vulgar questions aren’t met with shock. No-one is scandalized. It just feels weird and inappropriate. After all, it is 2022 and all the adults have seen StepBrothers, which came out in 2008. The incredible thing about the Tim Robinson character is that he wants to be socially acceptable, he is just utterly clueless as to how to do it and is making and committing to blindingly wrong choices to that end. In the “Haunted House Tour” the character is so well developed, and so well acted, that I experienced not only hilarity but a dramatic catharsis.

It is a very good idea to take this Tim Robinson character and insert him into a movie wherein Paul Rudd, that very cool and easy going guy, moves in across the street, and the chrance develops for them to develop a friendship, that is before Paul Rudd realizes just how strange and off putting the Tim Robinson character is. This is basically the plot of “Friendship”. It is a little like “The Cable Guy” but told from the point of view of Jim Carrey.

The main problem here is that the Tim Robinson character (named Craig Waterman) is inexplicably married to a successful business woman played by the beautiful Kate Mara. They have been married for so long that they have a teenage son. Craig Waterman also has a good, if not reputable, job as an advertising executive for addictive phone applications. Make no mistake, this is the Tim Robinson character, who is prone to giant social gaffes and inexplicable moments of wrath. So, what is he doing gainfully employed and happily married for more than a decade? That doesn’t really make sense. And you can’t blame his behavior on the added presence of Paul Rudd. Paul Rudd is playing the stereotypical Paul Rudd character. He’s just a cool guy. It’s not like he is driving Craig Waterman crazy.

What would make more sense is if Craig Waterman had an obscure dirty job and lived at home with his mother, and maybe one or both of them were hoarders. (That’s the backstory of the “Haunted House Tour” after all). I think this would make Craig Waterman more endearing, and Paul Rudd’s cute circle of friends more snobbish/elistish when they (understandably) reject him.

Still, besides the missed opportunity, there are several good moments in this movie. One of my favorites included the quick scene with an obscure actor named Connor O’Malley along with his character’s viewpoint about the forever war in Afghanistan. I also really like the toad-acid trip scene in which Craig Waterman orders a sandwich. Man, I just wished the move was better because the concept is such a good idea. And these opportunities, they don’t come around all that often.

Sinners (4/5 Stars)

We have been waiting for this movie for ten years. In 2013, Writer/Director Ryan Coogler entered the scene with the impressive Fruitvale Station. We were all happy to see him hired by the biggest of studios (and definitely get paid) to make some wide release blockbusters like Creed (2015) and then Black Panther (2018). But unlike other auteurs that get scooped up into the money-making apparatus of reboots, remakes, and superhero franchises (Chistopher Nolan comes to mind), he either did not have the opportunity or chose not to take a step back and make some smaller movies in between his large ones. Ryan Coogler has not made a truly personal movie since 2013 until now. Sinners is undeniably Ryan Coogler’s movie. He built up a lot of good will (and box office) over the past decade, and here he is spending it.

Not that Sinners is a small movie. Yes, it takes place over the course of one day and one night in 1930s Clarkson, Mississippi, but it comes with all the technology and scope of a Marvel movie. Besides the obvious example of Oppenheimer, there has not been a more appropriate movie for an IMAX screen in the past several years than Sinners. I saw this movie in a regular movie theater and was consistently reminded by Coogler’s framing that I was seeing only a part of what he wanted to show me. My time to see it in IMAX has passed, but if it ever was released again in an IMAX theater, I would try to see it again.

The story as it is involves two identical twins, Smoke and Stack (both played by Michael B. Jordan) who have been gone from town for a while. First then fought in World War I and then they ran booze in Chicago for Al Capone. Despite the segregated reality of Mississippi, they have decided to open a bar/nightclub in their home town and spend the first half of the movie impressing the natives with their big city style and money and recruiting the best band they can for opening night. This involves rounding up an old bluesman like Delta Slim (played by Delroy Lindo) but more importantly an up-and-comer Sammie Moore (played by Miles Caton) whose voice is reminiscent of James Earl Jones.

The auditory aspects of Sinners are as impressive as its visual aspects.. Sinners has enough music in it to be classed as a musical, and Ryan Coogler shows his knowledge and very good taste in old school blues and old tyme folk music, which fill up the movie wall to wall. Sometimes it is hard to tell what makes good sound mixing or sound editing, but I would be very surprised if this movie was not going to show up next awards season nominated and perhaps winning those awards. (I do not believe there will be a nomination for Best Song because I think all of these songs are pre-existing, however, my category for Best Use of a Song will very likely include at least two entries from this movie).

I thoroughly enjoyed the experience of Sinners, but I sit here and wonder whether I really understood the overall theme and plot of this movie. The main storyline I have already described is clear enough. But halfway through the movie, vampires show up and they surround the nightclub with the aim (I think) of turning the talented Sammie Moore into one of them. Clarkson, Mississippi is known as the place where blues musician Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil in exchange for musical success. That might be relevant. I’m not sure. Sammie Moore seems to be plenty talented already. Honestly, I’m not exactly sure what the sins are that the film title Sinners appears to be referring to. Is it just basic drinking, carrying on, and fornicating? Because I don’t think the characters were doing anything heavier than that besides killing vampires.

Nor does the vampires’ desire to obtain Sammie Moore seem to be a not-so-veiled metaphor for the white man’s mission to steal the essence of their (supposedly) more artistic/creative black brethren (see Jordan Peele’s Get Out). After all, the vampires have their own music, and Ryan Coogler made sure to incorporate some very good samples of it. The vampire’s cover of Rocky Road to Dublin is awesome. Indeed, when attempting to be invited into the nightclub (basic vampire rules do apply here), the vampire's claim that they are not prejudiced and that to join them would be an opportunity to join an equal fraternity of undead. Whether it is better to be an undying and powerful vampire or to be a black person in the segregated South is an argument that gives the characters (and us) pause.

The movie devolves into bloody fist fights before the last remaining characters make it to the morning. Overall, the mission to open this nightclub is a dramatic failure even if the Klan get dealt a major blow near the end of the film, almost as an afterthought.

One more thing can be said about the performance of Michael B. Jordan. I’ve seen actors playing against themselves as identical twins, and this is not the best version of that. But more distracting is the fact that Michael B. Jordan is still built like Apollo Creed and Killmonger. Is it appropriate for a normal human in 1930s Mississippi to look like they’ve been into competitive body-building? It is even more distracting given that Michael B. Jordan was a respected actor (see The Wire, Fruitvale Station) before he became a human action figure, as opposed to, say, Arnold Schwarzenneger who doesn't really have the range to be anything but Arnold Schwarzenneger. Nicholas Cage did this for a few years (1996-1998) but then became normal again. If Ryan Coogler can escape the constraints of franchise movies, then I think it is time to release Michael B. Jordan as well.

Low Cinema and "Dirtier Work"

My neighborhood, Ridgewood, Queens, NYC once again has a movie theater. The last one closed circa 2008 and was subsequently converted into a Blink Fitness gym circa 2018. This is not a commercial movie theater, more like one man’s hobby. It has about forty seats for one screen, which is more like the size of a large private screening room. There is a small concession stand, which sells popcorn and beer (good idea) at a reasonable price. There is only one bathroom, which I think is probably an oversight. The outside of the building doesn’t look like a theater at all. You would have to know it is one from a cursory review of online articles about the place or a knowledge of the cinema’s instagram page. So it feels like a secret, which has its own sort of appeal.

At this moment, it is hard to predict what types of movies the theater will choose to present, but I would think it will be a rare sighting for there to be any first run movies on their first weekend here. The movie I saw was a special edition of Norm MacDonald’s 1998 film “Dirty Work”, more on that below, and the screenings for that have all been sold out. The other movies on the calendar are even more obscure. Indeed, the whole thing is the brainchild of HBO’s John Wilson, creator of the documentary series “How To”, so I expect it will be mainly niche obscure films, or maybe even more of his documentaries that never made it to HBO. Still, the neighborhood is so starved for a movie theater, and the size of it is so small, that I think they could show almost anything and the place would be packed. And since the space has not been rented out from movie studios months in advance like first-run movie theaters are, an astute owner could even decide to rent it out as an event space. Want to get a somewhat large group of people to watch something, Low Cinema could be cool for that.

I was 12 years old when Norm MacDonald’s “Dirty Work” came out. I couldn’t see it in the theaters, but I have some sort of pride in my good taste remembering that I really wanted to see it based solely on the advertisements. The premise is exceedingly simple. Two losers open a “revenge-for-hire” business. Essentially, they are hired by nice(?) people to go around pranking the neighborhood jerks. That’s a good setup for lots of jokes and situational comedy. When I started buying DVDs about a year or two later, “Dirty Work” was one of the first ones I purchased. I have seen it plenty of times since then, but not lately. It has probably been a decade since I saw it at Low Cinema.

This is the “Dirtier” version of the movie. Apparently, in order to secure a PG-13 movie rating, the creators cut about five minutes of the randiest jokes, and in one notable scene set in the county jail, express out loud what in the regular version is only whispered. (Hint: it rhymes with Anal Rape.) The good thing is that the changes are minimal and the jokes inserted are funny enough to the point where the overall merit of the movie is hardly impacted. I could take or leave any one of them, except for the added lines for the sweet grandma that wants to hire the boys not to stop the demolition of her house (like in the original version) but to enact a gruesome form of revenge on the perpetrators. That scene I wish was in the original. I enjoyed seeing this movie in a movie theater with strangers, where I can attest, based on the laughter in the room, that it is still funny.

When someone restores a movie and adds five minutes just to show it to about 40 people in a niche theater in Ridgewood, Queens, it is because they really really like the film. Norm MacDonald’s comedic style has fallen into disrepute with the changing of the times in the past 10 years, more about that below. But beyond that, I feel his humor is generally underrated because most people are uncomfortable admitting that jokes that seem so dumb and simple made them laugh so much.

One of the best audiobooks I have ever listened to is Norm MacDonald’s reading of his autobiography. The vast majority of this book is bullshit, but he does kind of frame the subject matter loosely based on the vague geography of where he was in his life. In that portion of the book in which he flagrantly lies about his time at Saturday Night Live, he also gives a studious account of his idea of the perfect joke: it is one where the funny is so purely distilled that the setup and the punchline are almost identical. Here is the example of this “perfect joke” that the book cites from his time at the Weekly Update desk at SNL:

“Julia Roberts told reporters this week that her marriage with Lyle Lovett has been over for some time. The key moment she said came when she realized that she was Julia Roberts and that she was married to Lyle Lovett.”

In Dirty Work, there is another example of this type of joke, which is uttered with perfect delivery by the antagonist of the story, multimillionaire real estate developer Travis Cole (played by Chistopher MacDonald coming off of Happy Gilmore and at the peak of his 1990s douchiness). Speaking to a reporter outside of the restored Chelsea Opera House, Travis Cole boosts the opening performance of Don Giovanni and then makes a silver-tongued remark about its non-profit purpose:

“As you know, all the proceeds will be for the benefit of the homeless. And you know how I feel about homeless people. They are people. And they have no homes.”

Since then, we have coined a word for that sort of pretentious bullshit. It’s called “virtue-signalling”, and it comes about when people express an undue amount of pity or outrage on behalf of the lower elements of our society in order to, I guess, look good for and/or score points against the other bitches at the yacht party. Meanwhile, like U2’s Bono, they have no compunction with directing their accountants to cheat on their taxes as much as legally possible.

There are plenty of jokes here that could not be made so easily today because the tides of taboo have shifted dramatically since the 1990s. Take for instance the many jokes about gay sex. In the 1990s, those jokes would have been directed at the overall societal taboo against expressing the ideas at all. That is the, the target of the joke would have been the upright censors, and the audience would have felt a roguish thrill from watching something they shouldn’t have been watching. But now, given that the homesexuals have won a dramatic and unambiguous victory, one might watch the “movie theater” scene (which features a surprise screening of “Men in Black…Who Like to Have Sex With One Another”) and feel that it is not okay to refer to gay sex as anything but normal, and isn’t that stampede out of the theater offensive to the gays. The Director of Dirty Work, Bob Saget, whose live performances were extraordinarily raunchy, was also affected by the cultural shift.

Sure, I think that is mainly right. But I suggest one recognizes that Norm MacDonald seemed to think that all lust was funny, hence all the prostitutes in this movie. Indeed, he got a lot of funny mileage in needling people about areas in which they felt shame. And why he was especially good at doing that was, well, because Norm MacDonald seemed to be entirely non-judgmental about it himself. Norm was needling you because he thought it was funny that you would feel shame about it, not because he thought you were doing something shameful. The only person Norm MacDonald thought was guilty was O.J. Simpson, and even him, he didn’t really have strong feelings towards. Instead, he seemed to think it was funny that race politics could be so heightened that half the country was willing to acquit a murderer as a sacrifice for them. And the more backlash he received from this heightened political atmosphere, the funnier he thought it was, which eventually led to his firing at SNL, and even that he seemed to think was funny.

What accounts for this personality? You’ll never know for sure because he was an extraordinarily private person. But the context of his death provides a hint. In the late 1980s, he was diagnosed with cancer for the first time. This was a total secret. I heard about it for the first time in a posthumous documentary. A few years ago he died of that cancer. He didn’t tell anyone about it. But he wrote his “autobiography” knowing that he had a death sentence. And in that book, he talks about it in a very deep way. (Actually, maybe not, the words come from the context of a fictional make-a-wish child with cancer. That child wants Norm to realize his dream of clubbing a baby seal. This is accomplished and the child, covered in the blood of victory, is miraculously cured of cancer.) Norm also had a large gambling problem and in one interview he stated that he had lost everything at least three times. You do all that, and you just might be a little more zen then the rest of us.

Death hangs over this film. There is Chris Farley, at his best in a small role, bloated and about to die. There is Jack Warden, an accomplished actor that once played the President (see Being There) in one of his last roles, giving much needed veteran weight to a cast of young clowns. Then Bob Saget died too soon. Then Don Rickles died too late. And now Norm is dead. Somehow Artie Lange is still alive. That’s like John Belushi surviving the original cast of Saturday Night Live.

And the acting, it is terrible, (besides Jack Warden). Norm MacDonald of course is awful, even playing a character as much like himself as possible. The acting is so bad that Chevy Chase’s performance becomes impressive if only by contrast.

But none of it matters because the movie is wall-to-wall jokes that come fast and in a movie that has no other purpose but to amuse you. Whether you are in the right frame of reference for this movie may be judged by one particular scene. Norm and Artie have been hired by a movie theater in which the manager is played by Don Rickles, a famous insult comic. The script has no lines for Mr. Rickles, all the direction it contains is that he should insult Artie Lange in his style. So, Mr. Rickles insults Artie, focusing particularly on his weight. ("Look at you, you baby gorilla.") Should you laugh at jokes made at the expense of a fat person? What if I told you that Artie Lange considered it to be one of the best days of his life because he got to see one of his comedy idols at work close up. You want to enjoy Dirty Work, you’ll have to come down to our level. Otherwise, there is always Don Giovanni.

Flight Risk (3/5 Stars)

The appearance of “Flight Risk” in movie cinemas would be a non-story if not for the unexpected pedigree behind the picture. The movie is a small-scale bottle episode that takes place entirely within a 90 minute plane flight from an unnamed non-descript town in Alaska to Anchorage, Alaska. The movie is so small the characters do not have last names. It appears to be the first produced screenplay by screenwriter Jared Rosenberg.

The conceit can be summed up in a few sentences. Winston, played by Topher Grace, plays a fugitive accountant for a mobster. He gets picked up by federal law enforcement, played by Michelle Dockery, and immediately surrenders and pleads for a deal. He appears to be much more afraid of his mobster boss then the feds. In order to get Winston to New York to testify in trial a trial that is happening right now (for the purposes of expediency, it is helpfully mentioned that the judge is a hard-ass and won’t agree to an adjournment) the feds charter a small plane to take Winston to Anchorage and then onto to Seattle and then New York. This plane is piloted by Daryl, played by Mark Wahlberg, who is not who he says he is. Spoiler alert, he works for the mobster, and the totality of the movie is contained in his efforts to kill everybody on board either slowly or immediately depending on his present circumstances. I really can’t say more without going into spoiler territory.

What is interesting about this movie is that it has a legitimate movie star, Mark Wahlberg, that seems out-of-place in such a small-scale project. Case in point, Mark plays a supporting character and yet he is the only person on movie poster. Mark's presence is likely explained by its director, one Mel Gibson. This is the first movie Mel Gibson has directed since 2016’s Hacksaw Ridge (a movie I did not get to review because it was unheralded on release, but one I ultimately considered the best of the year), and second movie since 2006’s Apocalypto (one of the more unique movies ever made). Mel Gibson would have directed plenty more movies since 2006 had he not gone off the deep end and said some very awful things. (I am generally forgiving about what people say and in particular what people say in private. For instance my bar is low enough to give Jon Gruden a total pass. Having said that, Mel Gibson said some crazy shit and as far as these things go, his cancellation is one of the more reasonable ones out there). Which is a shame because whenever he does put something out there, regardless of whether it is enjoyable or not, it is usually well made and distinctly original. If Hollywood truly cared about diversity (and you know I don’t), what it should do is employ more people like Mel Gibson because he actually has a different point of view from most of the movie industry. He has a different point of view from most people in general. I see online that he is making a sequel to Passion of the Christ, entitled The Resurrection of the Christ. It is about time, if only because of the tremendous commercial opportunity that it is likely to represent. It is easy to make a lot of money when you are the only person catering to a very deprived audience (see James Cameron’s Titanic and blockbuster movies made for women as of 1997).

“Flight Risk” feels like a director getting taking a practice run on a smaller project just to remind himself how it works. It is competent. The actors do their jobs with respectability. The screenplay is a little too on the nose with Topher Grace’s sarcasm and Mark Wahlberg’s creepy threats, but really, if you have confined yourself to the cockpit of a small plane for 90 minutes, this is basically as good of a movie as you are going to get. It has a brisk running time, enough action, and some of the jokes land. Michelle Dockery is likable. It came out in January. What are you going to do? Hey, at least it gave me an excuse to write about Mel Gibson as a director. I’ve been doing this blog for twenty years and I haven’t had that opportunity.

The Penguin (4/5 Stars)

HBO’s new television series, The Penguin, starts off where the latest Batman reboot (Robert Pattinson’s 2022 The Batman) ends. Oswald Cobb, Colin Farrell reprising his role, breaks into the luxury apartment of the late crime boss Carmine Falcone to steal some blackmail material he knows is hidden in a wall-safe. He is surprised by Carmine’s son, Alberto Falcone and quickly turns on some subservient charm to distract from his trespassing. It works and they both relax over some drinks and start talking about Alberto’s inherited role as the boss of the Falcone family. Alberto feeling about it is one of smug entitlement. In an unguarded moment, Oswald describes a crime boss from his childhood, a guy who was feared but also respected, who helped the poor and knew everybody’s name. That was another type of power, Oswald reflects sincerely. Alberto finds Oswald’s take on power to be weak. He laughs and insults Oswald. In response, Oswald takes out his gun and shoots Alberto until he is dead. He sits there with a satisfied grunt until another moment passes and he realizes how enormously stupid his actions just were.

The Penguin above all else is an impressive exercise in character development. There are a lot of twists and turns that the murder of Alberto sets off in this eight episode arc in which Oswald schemes and cajoles and wrests power from the various organized crime syndicates of Gotham, but this first scene is especially important. The murder is not premeditated. It is an impulsive act. So despite where everything ends up, let it be known that Oswald did not have a plan. He may have a vague ambition of being the boss, but much of what he does here is scene-by-scene improvisation and self-preservation.

This matters as to the study of Oswald’s character. Much is made of whether the man can be trusted and whether he says what he means. It’s complicated and Colin Farrell’s performance is one in which Oswald seems to believe what he is saying in the moment, but as soon as options are limited or something different develops, well, he can adapt. Like the first scene, Oswald has this romantic idea of a godfather crime boss, but this isn't really who he is. He's too angry, too thin-skinned, and too reckless for that. 

Why can't Oswald measure up to his ideal? Well, that’s what makes The Penguin such an interesting TV series. The main impetus for Oswald’s character defects is also what makes him sympathetic. He has a disability, a bum leg. Combined with his ungainly height and weight, his bum leg makes him waddle, like a penguin, which is what people call him behind his back when they aren't saying it to his face. He is not helped by an ugly scar that crosses his face horizontally under the nose. (A shout-out to the magnificent makeup work here). Because of his poor looks and disability he is overlooked and mistreated. This is both a blessing and a curse. A blessing because he is continually underestimated. A curse because his personality does not allow him to forget or ignore slights, which results in impulsive and sometimes stupid reactions. A blessing and a curse because he uses the way he is treated as an excuse to treat others poorly, which is helpful to his ambition if not his soul. And since he understands how mistreated people feel, he knows how to persuade and/or manipulate other mistreated people. 

There is this modern tendency in storytelling to treat disabilities as boons. The X-Men are a prime example of this. The series is a metaphor for discrimination (humans v. mutants), but the mutants all have superpowers. That is, their differences make them superior to normal people. In real life however, disabilities are exactly what they appear to be, a detriment to the people who have them. It is possible that a disability can provoke a more resilient type of character. For example, you hear some very successful people who have dyslexia claim that the inability to read correctly made them more creative with problem solving.  I do not doubt their experiences, but it is also true that the majority of people with dyslexia just straight up have a harder time learning and as a result don’t learn as much. There are many historical examples of people overcoming their disabilities and rising to greatness: Catherine the Great, FDR, etc. But most of the time, a person’s defects make them worse. It is a tough reality and it is rare that a movie shows it. But this is what makes The Penguin so interesting. Given what we are seeing on the screen, I think it is fair to say that Oswald would have been a better person if he didn’t have a limp. He would have been treated better and would have treated other people better in return. When Batman goes head to head with Oswald Cobb in the next movie, the best way to outfox him would be for that handsome billionaire to make fun of the Penguin’s waddle. It would likely provoke an impulsive error.

The weakness of The Penguin has to do with a story-line that too often solves political problems with murder. (One can contrast this with Shogun, a TV series that understood its society and people so well that the story resolved itself without the need of an actual battle.) There are several plot points where a multitude of people are liquidated just as soon as their presence in the storyline is no longer needed. Some are executed in crowded rooms with many people in them, as if the writers were in such a hurry that they didn't give the doomed men the courtesy of being dragged outside first and murdered on the lawn so that their blood wouldn't spill all over the nice carpets and hard-wood floors. It must be said that these types of murders should be much more traumatic to their many witnesses than are ever shown. Would you work for a boss that murdered an employee in the middle of an office meeting? Even minor characters deserve a little more for their deaths than what they get here. (Sometimes it is a major character that gets this treatment. I still haven’t forgiven the later seasons of Game of Thrones for how they dispatched Littlefinger).

There is also the character of Sofia Falcone (played by Cristin Milloti), which is in turns well-developed and also supremely outlandish. Her backstory is that she was the favored daughter of Carmine Falcone, but upon the outcome of a seemingly innocuous conversation, her father frames her for the murders of 10 women and has her committed to Arkham Asylum as a dangerous psychopath. Sofia is played by Cristin Milioti, a small woman. The type of corruption that would result in this type of framing and institutionalization is far out even for Gotham. I mean, come on. How does a small woman strangle anybody? They should have framed her for poisoning instead. Or just institutionalized her. That would have been enough.

Sofia Falcone makes a bunch of moves of her own, but ultimately, even though she has capacity for ruthlessness (and a decent wardrobe for it), her heart isn’t into it like Oswald's is. She makes the mistake of seeking revenge on a sociopath. She thinks she can hurt Oswald, like emotionally. But by definition, you can’t torture a sociopath emotionally. That’s what makes them so dangerous. And in particular, Oswald here has an uncanny ability to escape fatal situations while his enemies are pausing for dramatic effect. 

The look of The Penguin continues Matt Reeve's moody portrayal of Gotham as a very rainy, neon red, and dingy place. There is another nod to Nirvana, this time with a cover of "Where Did You Sleep Last Night" which Kurt Cobain famously covered from a Ledbelly song in his MTV Unplugged performance. And in the first two episodes, there are several scenes with very tasty martinis. Like most TV series, I bet it could have been a few hours shorter, but this is a good interlude between Batman movies. It is said a lot about franchise heroes, that after a few movies, it is the villains that become the attraction. Nowhere is that more true than for the Batman franchise and with this series has become truer still.