Had COVID not been a factor, I would have probably seen Nobody (2021) in the theater. It seemed like a simple movie - and it is. It's an excuse for both a middle-aged-guy action fantasy, as well as videogame-style super action, just below the absurdities of John Wick (worth noting, this is written by the same guy, Derek Kolstad). The kind of movie where our hero cannot be killed even if 20 guys with guns are coming at him and he does Krav Maga and Gun-Fu while they come at him, inexplicably, one on one and the baddies can't hit the hero when they all shoot at him for 30 feet away.
Back in 2018, I recall a story breaking on the news about 12 Thai soccer players and their coach trapped in a cave that had been flooded by summer rains. I'm going to be completely candid: I heard the details and immediately tuned out the story afterwards. Everything I heard told me that this story would end with 12 dead children and a dead coach. And probably some rescue crew. In what seemed a bleak year (ha ha... how little we knew then!), signing myself up for updates on what seemed a deathwatch just seemed morbid.
And then someone told me "no, they got out. Yes, all of them."
I read some details of what had happened and it seemed like madness, but I wrote it off as "boy, I guess Navy SEALS really know their stuff."
Forget all of that.
The Rescue (2021), knows you know those broad strokes, but recreates the timeline of the story through interviews, actual footage from the participants, some occasional recreation footage (using the actual participants), news footage and some excellent graphics. And the story is both one-hundred times more unbelievable than you're expecting and ultimately, that same level of magnitude a story of the best in humanity.
I hesitate to talk too much about the logistics or even about the participants, but it is fascinating to find out that the main divers to assist in the search and rescue were private citizens, mostly from the UK, cave diving hobbyists who put everything on the line for this effort. And you may ask yourself "what sort of person scuba dives in caves?" And that would be a *great* question, because these are not extreme sports enthusiasts, but an assortment of misfits and the kind of people who will go into a body of water completely surrounded by rock on all sides.
It doesn't matter that you know that the kids made it out. The movie broke me with footage of a young mother standing at the cave's mouth calling to her son to come home, and just kept whittling me down from there. Yes, the divers are remarkable, but 13 boys also held together, monumental efforts took place to move rivers, to find alternatives and support the ongoing work.
I very much remember the drama of Baby Jessica's rescue from a well in West Texas and how the people of West Texas pulled together to save one child. Here, an international collective and thousands of locals pitched in.
Give it a shot. You might momentarily have faith in us as a species. You might also believe some cosmic convergence is possible.
Directors: Jared Bush/ Byron Howard/ Charise Castro Smith
Disney has really doubled down on the "here's a big ol' metaphor, but we're also going to explicitly spell it out" style of storytelling that Pixar's been doing for a while. That's not a dig. You're playing to an all-ages audience that needs some hand-holding, and in general, for who these movies are for, I think it works.
I'm not surprised I liked Encanto (2021). I'm honestly far more surprised when I am not onboard with a Disney film or find it just "meh". After deconstructing the idea of the Princess movie with Frozen and Tangled, and doing some fun character stuff with Wreck It Ralph, essentially doing a family dramedy is a good pivot. And it's kind of remarkable we're in an era where we aren't depending on wicked stepmothers and cheesed-off sorceresses to tell a story. Sometimes the conflict can be person vs. themselves. But this one also has baked in protagonist vs. society and fate, I guess.
Hoo-boy. I think I have more to say about the topics covered in Beanie Mania (2021) than I have to say about the film itself.
But, so.
Beanie Mania covers the 1990's Beanie Baby fad and tulip-like frenzy around the little doorstops that became an obsession with some people at the time. There are interviews with people who were Beanie celebrities, former employees of Ty (the company that made the bean bags), with distributors and a last, passing glance at how YouTubers are maybe reviving Beanie Mania.
It collects news stories and people who were there at the time are remarkably candid about what they did and why and what was happening. And many of them are still in the Beanie Business, which is still a thing, I guess (look, eBay has taught us secondary markets are there for *everything*). There's no gory murders of sex scandals, but it is fascinating to remember that this really was a nation-wide obsession for a minute there, and that it really tapped into so many parts of how we can project our hopes and dreams into something as ridiculous as a bean bag made to look like a frog.
Of the near universal experiences of my generation (that being the generation known as "X") was the certainty that you were plopped down in front of a television as soon as you could sit upright and you were a fan of Sesame Street. It was partially a product of the fact we usually had three networks and a PBS affiliate on our TV's and very little else, but also because it was recognized by our parents as both entertainment and a source of education.
As a kid, I remember the combination of Muppets, kind adults and kids, animation and music made it a variety show that I personally wanted to watch. I am sure I had favorite bits and characters, but that's all been lost to time as all I can remember is a general warm spot for the show, the actors and the Muppets. And, now, the nostalgia when seeing footage from that era hits me like a wave. It's tapping into brain cells that haven't been accessed much in years, and related feelings both directly and indirectly tied to the show.
Not going to bury the lede. Single All the Way (2021) is the gay-starring romcom for the holidays that Netflix's DataTron3000 realized would do quite well for clicks as it would serve a perpetually underserved audience. The probably good news is that it is not trying to either fit the Hallmark mold, nor is it a Hallmark spoof. It's its own, stand-alone, comedy movie.
I am already aware that it is also a YMMV affair, as are many-a-comedy, as I've had one pal weigh in with a "that sucked" response, and - hey - you probably do not want my opinion of your favorite comedy. Unless it's Young Frankenstein. Or anything with Madeline Kahn.*
So. This movie featured Brooke Shields and so I watched it. I feel like I don't need to explain that.
I don't understand the whole thing about Scotland and Ireland and romance, but it is a thing. Usually it involves great hair and moors. This movie lacks moors, it just has great hair.
Oh, Charlotte Bronte, what hath thou wrought?
Anyway, Carey Elwes is a cranky Scottish Duke who lives in a castle. Brooke Shields is a romance writer who has written a controversial ending to her novel series and pissed off her fans and Drew Barrymore calls her out on it, saying she's letting her divorce influence her thinking (she is right).
Brooke's family is from Scotland and has connections to the castle - so she flees there. There's a dog, some nice folks at the pub, and I'm sure other stuff.
Anyway - you can fill in the rest. But Brooke looks smashing.
So, a few years back I noted that occasional Superman and Ray Palmer actor Brandon Routh had signed up for a Hallmark movie. It makes sense. He films in Canada all the time, anyway. Might as well get a little scratch between seasons of TV and whatever else he's up to.
What I remembered about the movie was (late edit: I had not seen all of this movie): Routh was a fireman, he was doing home maintenance, a cat was involved, and the love interest could also act (Hallmark has to balance how terrible their leads are, and many of them are truly wooden robots). But a lot of name folks pass through the Hallmark factory every year, so I enjoyed it for what it was and then chucked the movie from anything resembling RAM in my head.
Well, lo and behold, someone scraped enough pennies together and got the cast back together from the cat-related movie and came up with a concept for a sequel. If one or two cats worked - why not 9?
Hallmark movies have now been around long enough that you do spot spoofs and satires. This is the second one I've spotted just this year, the other I need to finish (The Bitch Who Stole Christmas, which appears to be a whole thing).
A Clüsterfünke Christmas (2021) is the kind of spoof you kind of crave, but also think won't be as good as you hope. But, in the rarest of Christmas miracles, it was actually consistently funny for the runtime of the movie. It never gets lost in the machinery of telling a story or caring what happens to anyone and remembers that it's job is to insert a joke every 30 seconds. But, you know, the film both stars and was written by Ana Gasteyer and Rachel Dratch, so - trusted sources.
I'm going to have to check out Jim Cummings' other stuff, because he's apparently his own one-man force within the film industry. I recognize him, but not as a lead - but he wrote, directed and starred in Wolf of Snow Hollow (2020), which is something people really don't do anymore. That era of auteurism has kind of gone the way of the dodo.
Released under the revived Orion films banner (and, my god, was it good to see that logo spin out in front of a movie again) - it's also nice to see genre indie distributors out there trying for something a bit different, and this film is a reminder of the positive results you can get from a single person with their hands on the wheel of a movie. Because Wolf of Snow Hollow (2020) is arguably about a small-town cop relentlessly chasing down a killer werewolf despite the fact that is absolutely the plot of the film. And this is where people might mistakenly say "it's good for a horror film" - but we don't say that at this blog.
I think sometimes why reviewers might make that statement is that they want something more out of their movie than a monster murdering people and eventually being killed in return. I mean, *fair enough*.
I have what I'd describe as a non-relationship with The Beatles.
I can't remember a time I wasn't aware of the existence of The Beatles, and since middle-school, I could pick out one of their tunes playing on the radio or over Muzak - but at some point when I was getting into music, I think I found the enormity of The Beatles as cultural force daunting, and their discography too big for me to get my head around. I also think I had a hard time - as a high schooler - reconciling the Ed Sullivan Beatles with the late-years Beatles. It was just so much.
I do know that in 1984 my parents took me to the movie theater to see Give My Regards to Broad Street. (That was when I first heard Eleanor Rigby and my wee brain was blown). But they, themselves, weren't huge Beatles fans.
This year vis-a-vis Hallmark movies has been an emotional rollercoaster. We had to switch cable services and wound up on YouTubeTV (recommended), but it had no Hallmark Channel. I was a little sad, but I don't *need* to see my Hallmark Christmas stories, so I figured: time to move on. But then, I was informed a week or so ago that, NO, YouTubeTV now carried all three Hallmark networks. Feliz navidad, indeed!
But, Jamie now has a pretty hard rule about not putting on Hallmark movies til Thanksgiving night, so I honestly hadn't been watching. But this last week, the network debuted a new movie, Christmas Together With You (2021) - and the stars caught my eye. Harry Lennix portrayed General Swann in Man of Steel, and Laura Vandervoort played Supergirl (sort of) on Smallville off and on for half the show's run. Thus, it got recorded.
And, then, I needed to watch something that needed minimal attention while I worked out. So here we are.
Like any other self-respecting 1990's hipster, I have a warm place in my heart for Dean Martin. I spend less time thinking about Martin than I do Bing Crosby, who was a huge inspiration to the Rat Pack, but - hey - one of my earliest memories is my dad singing the intro to "That's Amore" to me as he tucked me in.
I would see Martin in Rio Bravo back in college, as well as Ocean's 11, and I started to get a picture of Martin and how he fit into the culture in ways that Frank Sinatra did not. Probably the easiest analog for us Gen-X'ers is Brad Pitt to George Clooney in the Soderbergh Ocean's films.
As a doc, Dean Martin: King of Cool (2021) works as a no-consequences sort of film. No one is out there debating Dean Martin in 2021. He was. He is. He's heard on the radio to this day, and his films are still okay. So it's about painting a portrait of a guy who was maybe a bit unknowable, even by his own children. And in that, what you wind up doing is - metaphor 1: seeing the silhouette of the guy against the backdrop of what we do know, and - metaphor 2: starting with the stone of what we know and chipping away til the statue of Dean Martin presents itself.
Format: I saw it on TV, but I believe they're trying to get you to watch it on Hulu
Viewing: First
Decade: 2020's
Director: Jodi Gomes
I was flipping channels and somehow caught what I thought was someone's rushed attempt to get in front of the "coming to Hulu" documentary by the New York Times about the fateful Super Bowl performance in which Justin Timberlake removed an item from Janet Jackson's wardrobe, exposing her breast on TV for a blink-and-you-miss-it moment. But, no, it was the actual doc.
I am not sure that Malfunction: The Dressing Down of Janet Jackson (2021) is the final word on the incident. I think it has a lot to say that I think is worth reflecting on, but at the center of the doc are a few gigantic questions it won't/ can't answer, and I am unsure some of the arguments are fully explored. What the doc manages to do is paint the most complete picture of the Super Bowl incident and the fallout, giving detail I'd not heard, following the incident's years-long legacy. But I can't quite sort what the doc is trying to say. Nor am I sure revisiting the incident is as compelling as cultural conversation as we'll treat it for a few weeks here.
Jamie and Ryan reveal their secret kung-fu-like prowess at podcasting as they dig into the next phase of Marvel as a new leading superhero takes the fore, alongside his wisecracking pal, Awkwafina, and Academy Award winner Ben Kingsley. Not to mention a few huge stars of international cinema in Michelle Yeoh and Tony Leung. And a rad dragon. Join us as we circle around this film, and sort out what our friends at Marvel are up to now.
I'm *fine* with Ryan Reynolds, Dwayne Johnson and Gal Gadot. I still watch movies because they star particular talent, but most of those actors have been dead for more than 10 years or way longer, and I guess there's a few people I'd show up to see just because they did a thing. But it's more likely I'll avoid a movie as long as possible if there are particular actors starring. None of the three here fall into the "must avoid" category. They're all... fine. You know more or less exactly what you'll get, and Red Notice (2021) is not here to blow the door off of those expectations.
Best case scenario, Red Notice is a fun way to introduce your tween to heist pictures and globe-trotting comedy-action-adventure. There's a lot of A-Team style bloodless gunplay where no one is ever shot, people crack wise, and it's all a big goof. It's not a new format, and this one is particularly gentle, so it's a good entry point.
Before COVID, I think maybe I would have talked myself into paying to see Jungle Cruise (2021) in the theater. I'm partial to Emily Blunt, I more or less like Dwayne Johnson. The Disney park ride of The Jungle Cruise is a highlight of every trip I've ever had when I hit one of the Disney parks - it's wrapped up in nostalgia, certainly, but it's a fun thing to go do.
I was a little put off that the jungle cruise of the film was not in Africa, as that would mean no elephants, my childhood favorite part of the ride, but... you know. It's fine.
We got together with JAL and Co to watch a movie projected on the big screen in his backyard. With a kid in play, and because we're highly likely to watch PG movies anyway, we defaulted to a family-friendly suggestion of Cruella (2021), which received weirdly inconsistent reviews and reaction on social media from what I saw, to the point where people seemed to be watching 2 or more different movies, which was enough to make me curious.
I've not been overly interested in Disney's live-action remakes or prequels, and so had made no special effort to see Cruella upon it's release. I like 101 Dalmatians (the animated version) well enough, but mostly out of nostalgia and loving the character animation more than me thinking it's the world's best film. And I wasn't overly concerned about who Cruella De Vil was and how she came to be.
Juan and Ryan ponder what has come before to consider what is happening now and what will happen next as they take on the famously unfilmable series of books from one of the greats of American sci-fi. Join us as we run the numbers on a show that's epic in scale, and maybe dropping a space elevator on the fans of the books.