SNL50 - In Search of More Cowbell

Everything Old is Old Again

Saturday Night Live, the comedic cultural cornerstone, celebrated its 50th anniversary this past Sunday night with a three-and-half-hour celebratory episode.

The SNL50 show was a messy mishmash of music and sketches from different eras that accurately portrayed the overarching uneven narrative of the franchise as it paid tribute to itself.

I’ve been watching SNL from the just about the beginning and have seen the highest of highs and the lowest of lows. Sunday’s SNL50 was neither of those, which makes it exactly what it should be for an anniversary show…passable.

Most of the prominent SNL players from the show’s long history were there with some notable exceptions. Of course, there have been some all-time greats who have gone on to their eternal reward much too soon, people like John Belushi, Gilda Radner, Chris Farley, Phil Hartman, and Jan Hooks. But notable absences on stage beyond the dearly departed were iconic SNL stars like Chevy Chase, Dan Akroyd, Billy Crystal, Dana Carvey and Bill Hader.

There were some very big comedy stars there though.

Eddie Murphy was like a tiger re-released into the jungle…he devoured every scene he inhabited with a level of funny ferocity and fury that only he can muster.

Murphy is the most talented man to have ever been on the show and seeing him unleashed back in his element with the added incentive of competition against his peers, made for comedy gold in two vibrant sketches.

Will Ferrell, who is maybe number two on the all-time SNL list behind Murphy for out and out comedic chops, did not fare so well. He was his usual gregarious and goofy self, but his rhythm and timing seemed off and he was out of sync all night.

While Murphy and Ferrell are the top two performers in SNL history, my personal favorite, Bill Murray, crushed his lone appearance when he ranked the top Weekend Update anchors of all time. Murray is the master of timing and he toyed with the audience and with Weekend Update host Colin Jost in glorious fashion. (As an aside…my favorites in the show’s history are in no particular order - John Belushi, Bill Murray, Eddie Murphy, Martin Short, Chris Farley, Will Ferrell, Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, Maya Rudolph, Kristen Wiig and Bill Hader)

The rest of the night was bumpy.

Steve Martin’s opening monologue was subdued and somewhat staccato, as Martin never fully grasped the material and was not able to read the cue cards with any vigor.

Tom Hanks stepped into a Black Jeopardy sketch midway through to replace Eddie Murphy…never a wise move…especially when Murphy had already stolen the sketch in the first 30 seconds. Hanks was uncomfortably bad but he was put in an unwinnable situation.

Other sketches, like the Lawrence Welk sketch, the wedding party sketch, the Broadway musical sketch and the alien abduction sketch, were pretty weak.

The Welk sketch was just chaotic and never fully coalesced as Will Ferrell was just a bit off and the bits fell flat. That sketch is usually very funny but it was much too awkwardly written and performed here to be decent.

The Wedding Party sketch just isn’t that funny to begin with and cramming it into a big show like this felt foolish. It also ran on forever and never hit its stride.

I’ve never been much of a fan of Kate McKinnon and find her “alien abduction” character to be decidedly one and done material, so reprising that flaccid character for the 50th anniversary seemed a stretch too, even with the addition of Meryl Streep.

I must admit that for the most part I really don’t get the John Mulaney thing…and that continued Sunday night as Mulaney’s big musical comedy number seemed like a muddled mess of Broadway inside jokes that misfired.

There was one interesting John Mulaney moment in the show and that was when he interjected into Steve Martin’s monologue with a joke about how difficult guest hosts are and that of the nearly 1,000 that the show has had, it is shocking that only two have committed murder. The joke was funny…and was obviously intended to be directed at O.J. Simpson and Robert Blake…but Alec Baldwin was in the studio and conspicuously absent from sketches until he made a late appearance introducing a video clip later on in the show…and I couldn’t help but wonder how uncomfortable that joke made him.

One final thing comedy wise…I know people love Adam Sandler, but I find him so egregiously unfunny and comedically pedestrian as to be criminal. I think Sandler, who only has two gears – idiotically infantile and atomic levels of shmaltz, has set the art of comedy back centuries in his career, so when he showed up to play one of his god-awful songs…this time a saccharine one, I rolled my eyes and cringed. Others feel different and think the song was very moving…but the only thing it moved on me was my bowels.

SNL has been a showcase for musical acts during the entirety of its run, and it had four musical performances Sunday night to celebrate that fact.

The music Sunday night was…well…it just was.

The show opened with the corpse of Paul Simon singing his hauntingly melancholy hit “Homeward Bound” with the luminous Sabrina Carpenter. Simon looks and sounds like he’s been soaking in a formaldehyde bath for the last fifteen years, while Sabrina Carpenter is so inconceivably, sublimely gorgeous, she seems like she was created in an anime lab somewhere.

Carpenter got the first laugh of the night when in reply to Paul Simon saying he first played “Homeward Bound” on SNL in 1976, she blurted out, “I wasn’t alive then…and neither were my parents”.

As for the song itself, Paul Simon simply can’t even pretend to sing anymore, which is sad, but thankfully Sabrina Carpenter, who is a pop princess - but there is no doubting that she has an exquisite voice and a charming stage presence, is a versatile and thoughtful duet partner and she carried the song without grandstanding…no small feat.

The second musical act was Miley Cyrus, who is the antithesis of Sabrina Carpenter. Why the hell is she famous again? The classless Cyrus is such a toxic combination of odd traits that don’t ever seem to gel at all…at least in my eyes. But apparently people love her.

Miley’s rendition of Prince’s “Nothing Compares 2 U” (made famous by Sinead O’Connor’s stunning cover) with Brittany Howard was devoid of everything that made Sinead’s version so great…namely artistic depth and soul.

Sinead was a walking wound, an Irish female Christ crying out to her father from the cross “why have you forsaken me?” with every song she inhabited. Miley Cyrus is a pop princess nepo baby who sings with the unsubtle zeal of a trailer park meth head prostitute barking at the moon while searching for a lost pack of menthol cigarettes.

For the third musical break Li’l Wayne performed with The Roots but I skipped that shitshow entirely because, to be frank, I think hip hop/rap is a grotesque, artless and thoughtless excuse for music, it is nothing more than a marketed minstrel show and noise machine that is so beyond awful and so asinine as to be lower in artistic value than month-old crocodile piss.

Speaking of old crocodile piss…the final musical number of the evening went to Paul McCartney, who closed the show by performing “Golden Slumbers/Carry That Weight/The End”. Notice I didn’t say he sang those songs because what McCartney was doing doesn’t rise to the level of singing.

Like his elder by a year Paul Simon, McCartney looks and sounds like he’s two thousand years old and unfortunately, he has completely lost his singing voice.

It was odd watching McCartney, who resembles a cool grandmother at her grandson’s wedding trying to keep up with the young people. It was cute at first but as it went on it became more and more uncomfortable as the possibility of the second to last Beatle dropping dead of natural causes on SNL became more and more possible, if not probable.

Ultimately, the fact that SNL has survived 50 years is incredibly impressive. In a corporatized entertainment industry, any entity, nevermind a comedic one, surviving more than a few years is reason to celebrate.

That SNL has, through some very, very lean years, been able to stay, if not funny, at least alive, is one of the more miraculous things to ever happen in television.

The show has, through sheer force of will (mostly Lorne Michaels’ will), been able to stay in the conversation for half a century even when it lacked talent, skill, insight and comedic chops.

The current cast is as dull and devoid of star power, charisma, comedy talent and vitality, as any cast in the show’s long history, but somehow SNL persists…and will for at least the foreseeable future.

The bottom-line regarding SNL50 is that the show was sometimes funny, sometimes cringy, sometimes exciting and sometimes boring…just like almost every other episode of SNL over the last half century.

As for the bigger picture regarding SNL...the fact that Kenan Thompson, who is deathly allergic to being even remotely funny and brings absolutely nothing to the comedy table, is the longest running cast member in SNL history…and is still in the cast…speaks to the Sahara level talent drought the show is currently enduring.

The reality is that, to paraphrase former Boston Celtics head coach, and current St John’s head basketball coach, Rick Pitino, “John Belushi, Dan Akroyd, Chevy Chase, Bill Murray, Gilda Radner, Eddie Murphy, Billy Crystal, Dana Carvey, Mike Myers, Chris Farley, Phil Hartman, Norm Macdonald, Will Ferrell, Amy Poehler, Tina Fey, Maya Rudolph, Kristen Wiig and Bill Hader, ain’t walking through that door. “

No, they ain’t…so SNL is gonna have to work really, really hard to survive long enough to see its 60th anniversary. As much as the show consistently disappoints me…I have to admit I’m rooting for it to make it to its next milestone, if for no other reason than to see a reinvigorated Eddie Murphy unleashed once again.

©2025

Flow: A Review - The Cat's Meow

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. A very compelling and unique animated feature that can be enjoyed by people of all ages on multiple levels.

Flow, written and directed by Gints Zilbalodis, is an arthouse, animated feature from Latvia that chronicles the journey of an unnamed dark grey cat.

The film, which is nominated for Best Animated Feature and Best International Feature Film at this year’s Academy Awards, is notable because it contains no dialogue and is completely rendered on the free and open-sourced software Blender.

When I was a kid, I had a dog…a great dog…named Scooter. He was a Gordon Setter/Bernese Mountain Dog/St. Bernard mix…an absolute behemoth and a complete and total gentle giant. The loveliest dog you ever could’ve had the pleasure to know and the best friend I’ve ever had.

I bring up Scooter because once as a little kid I decided to follow him for a day – this was back in olden times when people let their dogs - and their kids, run free and wild off of leashes. So I, by myself, followed Scooter as he made his daily rounds one afternoon. I kept a good distance from him so he didn’t know I was following him – or at least he let me think he didn’t know I was following him.

Scooter went on quite a journey that day, deep into the woods on a trek only he could understand, with little old me spying intently on him. We went into and out of the woods, across fields, over streams, through muck, mire, brush and construction sights. I don’t know how many miles we covered that day but it was a magical mystery tour for me and probably just another day at the dog office for Scooter.

Which brings me back to Flow…which essentially does the same thing I did with Scooter except with a cat and with much, much higher stakes.

Flow is a sort of wondrous movie. It is a simple film yet is filled with complexities. It is both an endearing dramatic tale of a cat and his friends and also a magical realist biblical mediation that is overflowing with profundities for those with the eyes to see them.

I watched the film with my young 9-year-old son and he posed lots of questions throughout…but was more saying these questions out loud to himself rather than expecting me to give him answers. The movie entertained him but it also really made him think. I was a very proud Papa indeed when he himself blurted out the biblical sub-text out loud to me before I ever articulated it…a sub-text to which many adults would be completely oblivious.

I bring up my son only because Flow is not the typical talking cat movie aimed at kids that you catch at the cineplex or on Disney +. In other words, Flow isn’t Garfield, but it is a film kids can still enjoy as a compelling animated movie without grasping its philosophical depths.

Adults can enjoy it too, but on a much deeper level, as the film touches upon a lot of pretty heavy philosophical ideas and leaves a good deal of room for interpretation. One of my favorite parts of the film was when it was over and me and my wife and son had a hearty discussion about it.

I’ve been intentionally vague about the plot, setting and characters in Flow because, as is my wont, I do not want to spoil the experience of watching the film for anyone who will give it a go. I knew nothing about the movie prior to watching and I think that ignorance was bliss and heightened my enjoyment.

I will note a couple things though.

First, the animation, which is done using Blender, a free and open-source software, is definitely uneven. The scenery and setting look gorgeous and are gloriously designed, but the animals are very hit or miss. Some animals look great and others look really cheap and shoddy.

Secondly, the film doesn’t entirely confine itself to the rules of the world it creates at its start – hence the magical realism aspect of the story. For example, and I won’t give specifics, the animals don’t always behave exactly as animals would behave – I’ll say no more than that. This is not a criticism per se, it is just something that knocked me off balance at first until I got on board with it.

Flow is still playing in some theatres, but it is also available on VOD, which is where I watched it. It cost something like $5.99 to rent, and we had three people watching so that’s a good deal.

The movie runs an hour and twenty-five minutes – and is captivating the entire run time…and an important note…stick around through the credits until the very end as the movie isn’t over until one small final scene plays out after the credits.

In conclusion, if you have kids, watch Flow with them. If you don’t have kids…watch Flow with another adult or by yourself. It isn’t the best film of the year, but it is the film this year that I’ve thought the most about after having watched it.

©2024

The Brutalist: A Review - American Dreams and Nightmares

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 3.25 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT.  A dramatically uneven, cinematically stellar, ambitious movie about ambition that is not a great film but a film that wants to be great.

The Brutalist, written and directed by Brady Corbet, stars Adrien Brody as Laszlo Toth, a talented Jewish Hungarian architect who survives the Holocaust and comes to America to start a new life.

The film, which has garnered 10 Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actor and Best Supporting Actress, is favored to dominate this year’s Oscars.

I have many thoughts on the philosophy and ideology expressed in The Brutalist, but will save that discussion for a second, more in-depth “analysis and commentary” article I will publish at a later date. For now, I will simply review the film.

The Brutalist is a film so cinematically ambitious as to be audacious. It is a film that asks a lot of big questions, and tackles a lot of big issues, and does so all on a miniscule $9 million budget, and a monumental three-hour-and-thirty-five-minute run time.

The film is exquisitely photographed using VistaVision, and has been released in both 35 mm and 70 mm. I watched it, twice, on a SAG screener in my house and was astonished at the cinematography by Lol Crawley – who is, in my mind, the undeniable star of the film.

Crawley’s camera movement, lighting and most of all his framing, are sublime. This is a small budget, arthouse film that looks and feels expansively epic, in both scope and scale, thanks to Crawley’s work.

The film is designed to question America and the American dream, and to give voice to not just the immigrant experience but the Jewish immigrant experience in particular. It deftly uses stock footage, newsreels and radio reports to set the stage and strengthen the not-so-subtle sub-text.

Writer/director/producer Brady Corbet has also spoken about the film being a metaphor for the filmmaking experience itself…which is plain to see. Filmmakers are, at least in some cases, artists who must navigate a cold and cruel capitalist system just to be able to make their art. Filmmakers aren’t painters who can buy a canvas and some paint and go to work. No, filmmakers need money to make their movie and therefore must get into bed with those that have it (in some cases…literally).

The same is true for architects like Laszlo Toth. An architect must have a benefactor…someone who has the desire to make a great building, the means to do so, but not the artistic vision and expertise to bring it to life.

The Brutalist as metaphor for the filmmaker’s plight is certainly insightful, if not a bit self-aggrandizing, and considering the film’s politics (which will be discussed in length in my second article) egregiously hypocritical.

Regardless of that, there can be no doubt that Brady Corbet had a big idea and was able to translate it onto the big screen. Kudos to him.

Not so good for him is that the film, which boasts a first half as good as any seen this year, stumbles badly in its heavy-handed second half. The film, which again, runs for three and a half hours, actually has an intermission…and it is after the intermission when it loses its grip on its narrative and its storytelling.

The biggest problem with The Brutalist is that it tries to do so much that it ends up doing not quite enough of anything.

For example, it is an immigrant story, an American capitalism story, a Jewish story, a Holocaust story, a love story, a sex story, an artist’s story and a drug addict’s story. The drug addict angle in particular is superfluous to the point of frivolous, as is the sex story, which does nothing to enhance the narrative but only confuse it.

A major problem for the film is the character of Erzsebet Toth, Laszlo’s wife who follows him to America. Erzsebet is played by the woefully miscast Felicity Jones, an actress I usually like quite a bit. Erzsebet’s arrival on the scene signals the end of the film’s tight grip on its drama, and the beginning of a rudderless wandering into the wasteland of dramatic doldrums.

The character of Erzsebet would have been better served never being seen, but rather as a sort of dream from Lazslo’s past never to be regained.

The rest of the cast are hit and miss.

Adrien Brody, who is nominated for a Best Actor Oscar for his work as Laszlo – a fictional character by the way, is good in the film. He has a lot to do and he definitely does it. I didn’t think his performance was transcendent, but I thought he did an admirable job. Considering the last-time I saw Brody act was when I recently watched the series Peaky Blinders, where he played an Italian gangster from New York in the 1920s…and it was one of the worst, most embarrassingly awful pieces of acting I’ve ever witnessed, and now he is probably going to win his second Best Actor Oscar, speaks to how insane Hollywood can be.

Guy Pearce is very good as Harrison Van Buren, the rich American who becomes enamored with Laszlo’s talent and hires him to build his dream project. Pearce really sinks his teeth into the role and never relinquishes his steely grip, devouring every scene he inhabits.

Other performances, like that of Alessandro Nivola as Laszlo’s friend Attila, and Joe Alwyn as Harry Van Buren Jr, seem to disappear the moment they wander onto screen. They are so weightless as to be non-existent.

There’s one final performance that is worth mentioning…and that is of Raffey Cassidy as Zsofia, Laszlo’s niece. What struck me about Cassidy’s performance is that she looks remarkably like Daniel Radcliffe, the actor who plays Harry Potter. So much so that I literally was wondering if Daniel Radcliffe was playing Zsofia in drag in some sort of arthouse tomfoolery – amusingly I wrestled with this question for quite a while as I watched. What is even weirder is that Raffey Cassidy, in real life and even as Zsofia, is a truly beautiful woman…which left me very, very confused. The bottom line though is that Raffey Cassidy is NOT Daniel Radcliffe, and Daniel Radcliffe is NOT Zsofia. Mystery solved.

The Brutalist intentionally calls to mind other ambitious films that, ironically enough, are about ambition, like Godfather II and There Will Be Blood. Unfortunately, The Brutalist shrinks exponentially in comparison to such cinematic greatness as Godfather II and There Will Be Blood.

The Brutalist’s biggest flaw, besides its over-abundant narrative, is that it gets so heavy-handed with its not-so-subtle symbolism in the second half of the film that it loses a great deal of its credibility, coherence and artistic good will.

The bottom line is that I am glad The Brutalist exists, and I’m glad Brady Corbet is so ambitious as to make it, but that doesn’t mean that it’s a great film.

I do not think The Brutalist is a great film, but I do believe it wants to be great, and is a great attempt to make a great film, and that makes it much more worthwhile than 99% of the garbage made nowadays.

If The Brutalist wins Best Picture at the Oscars I won’t be dismayed, even though I don’t think it’s the Best Picture I’ve seen this year. I will celebrate its win because hopefully it will allow for other filmmakers to take equally big swings when they get their turn at bat.

Brady Corbet took a big swing with The Brutalist and he flied out to right field just short of the warning track. No shame in that. Maybe the next guy, or maybe Brady Corbet the next time he gets up, will hit it out of the park, or off the wall, or into the gap for a double. Hell, at this point in cinema history I’d take a bloop single, a walk, or a hit by pitch over the strikes out that keep piling up.

Make no mistake…The Brutalist is infinitely better, and more worthwhile than recent Best Picture winners Nomadland, Everything Everywhere All at Once, and the god-awful CODA.

As for recommending this movie…I do recommend people give it a shot and watch it with an open mind. It will be, simply said, a bridge too far for most normal people. It’s expansive run time, challenging themes and numerous dramatic narratives, will be too much for normies to digest, especially since the film is not a cinematic classic like Godfather II or There Will Be Blood.

But just because I think most people won’t love it, or even like it, doesn’t mean I think people shouldn’t give it a shot. I didn’t love the film, but I admire its ambition, and I watched it twice.

So, if you have three and a half hours and want to wallow in lukewarm arthouse waters contained in a gloriously crafted, artisan bathtub, then give The Brutalist your attention. At the very least it will trigger discussions about both its quality and its philosophy/ideology…which are decidedly meaty topics for debate…and in my eyes a movie that triggers debate is definitely a movie worth watching.

©2025

A Different Man: A Review - The Elephant Man in the Room

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 2.75 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. This is definitely a flawed and uneven film, but it is also a film that features a fantastic performance from Sebastian Stan, so it’s worth giving it a shot on streaming.

A Different Man, starring Sebastian Stan, chronicles the travails of Edward (Stan), a man suffering from a severe case of neurofibromatosis, which gives him a grossly disfigured face and leaves him socially isolated.

I knew nothing about A Different Man before seeing it – didn’t know the plot, the genre, the purpose or meaning behind the film…and if I’m being honest, after having watched it, I still feel like I still don’t really know all that much about it.

A Different Man is not a terrible movie, not at all, in fact it has a lot going for it, not the least of which is a superb performance from its star Sebastian Stan, but it is a frustratingly uneven film.

I won’t give much of the film away…not even a whiff of spoilers here…but the first half of A Different Man is a really cinematically invigorating experience, as it sets itself up as a very vibrant drama accentuated by Stan’s terrific acting work.

But then about midway through, the film transforms and transitions from an intriguing drama to a rather farcical comedy. The tonal shift is jarring and, in my opinion, very unsatisfying.

The second half of the film is so tonally off-kilter to the first half that it feels frivolous and superfluous, two things which the first half most definitely is not.

That is not to say that the more comedic material falls flat…it doesn’t. There are some legitimately funny scenes and sequences in the second half of the film…like a discussion about JFK and Lincoln, it just feels out of place and like it should be in a different movie.

In fact, there are a few different movies struggling to break out in A Different Man but we don’t get to glimpse enough of any of them for this movie to truly shine.

For example, as previously stated this could’ve been a really gritty and gruesome character-study drama. Or it could have been a sort of absurdist, reality-bending psycho-dramedy. Or it could have been a flat-out farcical comedy. It ended up trying to be a bit of all of them and ending up being not quite enough of any of them.

This film is writer/director Adam Schimberg’s third feature, and interestingly enough, it is his second major feature dealing with physical, specifically facial, disfigurement.

Schimberg was born with a cleft-palate and brings a unique and very interesting perspective to the navigation of disfigurement issues from both sides of the coin.

He also brings a somewhat intriguing cinematic and narrative style. One can’t help but think that Schimberg has a great movie in him that he just hasn’t quite matured as a filmmaker enough to produce. I think once he figures out what exactly he wants to say and how exactly he wants to say it, he’ll be a powerful auteur.

The very best thing about A Different Man is Sebastian Stan as Edward. Stan gives a remarkably versatile performance which features existential drama, frantic comedy and everything in between.

Stan’s Edward, particularly in the first half of the film, is so well-done, and so specific and detailed, that it is actually shocking considering he is best known for playing Bucky Barnes in the Marvel movies.

Watching Stan flex his artistic acting muscles instead of his actual muscles was a joy to behold. Even after the shift in the second half of the film, Stan stays committed and keeps on crushing this role, showing a versatility and skill level that is astonishing.

Sebastian Stan was nominated for a Best Actor Oscar this year but it wasn’t for A Different Man, but rather for his work as Donald Trump in The Apprentice. I have not seen The Apprentice so I can’t speak to his work in it, but I will say that Stan definitely deserves a nomination for his work in A Different Man.

The rest of the cast do very good work as well, most notably Renate Reinsve as Ingrid and Adam Pearson as Oswald.

Reinsve is fantastic as Edward’s subtly seductive, arthouse, manic pixie dream girl, neighbor Ingrid. She is one of those actresses who so effortlessly commands your attention. She never pushes too hard and never gets lost in the lesser parts of the script.

Pearson, who plays Oswald – Edward’s sort of alter-ego, is a magnetic screen presence who has a such a vivid and visceral energy to him that he is undeniable.

Ultimately, A Different Man could have and maybe should have, been a different movie. But the movie that it is, I suppose, good enough…or at least interesting enough, to be worth watching.

The film is currently streaming on MAX, which is where I saw it, and although I think it has some flaws and some issues, I also think it is worth giving it a watch especially if you have MAX.

A Different Man is not a great film, or a particularly profound film, or a keenly insightful film, but it is a unique enough film, and better than most of the thoughtless junk out there, to be worthy of watching.  If you go in with tempered expectations you might come out feeling a bit more positive about it than I did. And regardless of whether you connect with the film or not, you will definitely leave it feeling a great deal more respect and admiration for Sebastian Stan as an actor and artist than you did going in.  

©2025

Sing Sing: A Review - Prison and the Power of Drama

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. A simple movie, featuring a terrific performance from Colman Domingo, that is bursting with complexity and humanity.

“In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.” - Albert Camus

Sing Sing, written and directed by Greg Kwedar, tells the story of the prisoners who act in the real-life Rehabilitation Through the Arts (RTA) drama program at Sing Sing Correctional Facility.

The film stars Academy Award Best Actor nominee Colman Domingo as well as a group of men who were actually incarcerated and part of the RTA, including Clarence “Divine Eye” Maclin and Sean San Jose.

Sing Sing has been in very limited release in theatres since July of 2024, but I only saw it just this past week as I got a screener for it from the Screen Actors Guild….and I’m very glad that I did.

As an acting coach and actor, Sing Sing is right in my wheelhouse. It is a simple film bursting with complexity that celebrates the healing power of both drama and the art of acting. It is also a testament to the fragility, intricacy and complications of humanity.

Regardless of who the actor is, whether it’s Tom Cruise or the third spear-carrier from the left, in almost every case they have gotten into acting in order to try and resolve some trauma. The way they try and resolve it through acting can be different for each person. For example, some people try to become famous in order to find the love they feel they never received or to gain wealth and power to protect themselves or to the feed the ego that their trauma birthed. Or some will try and garner accolades to elevate their crippled self-esteem, or try to find respect by becoming an “artist” to show their commitment and purity to a higher cause. And some might do all of the above as the uses of acting to heal trauma are as diverse and vast as trauma itself, as I can attest from having worked with so many actors and actresses over the years.

What I loved about Sing Sing is that it does an admirable job of showing how acting (or any art) can, for those with the courage to dive in, cut through the bullshit and get to the heart of the matter and the soul of the actor.

Colman Domingo, who was nominated for a Best Actor Oscar last year for Rustin and again this year for Sing Sing, is the heart and soul of this film. Domingo is utterly fantastic as John “Divine G” Whitfield, an inmate of some acclaim who has written books and plays while serving his time.

Domingo gives a subtle yet stirring performance that is filled with such complexity and humanity as to be a marvel. He is at once a saint, yet also crippled by his frailties, such as his ego and his fury at what he sees as an unjust system.

Colman Domingo probably won’t win Best Actor at the Oscars this year, but having seen all the nominated performances I can say unabashedly that he should.

Another stand out is Clarence Maclin who plays himself in the film. Maclin, a former real-life inmate and participant in the RTA, is a thug on the exterior but is a thoughtful, insightful and ambitious artist on the inside.

Maclin can mimic menace at the drop of a hat, but it is when he starts to push back against his “natural” instincts and actually becomes introspective that he comes to life and lights up the screen.

The rest of the real-life former inmates are very good in their roles because they seem like exactly what they are…real people who are kind of uncomfortable acting and being vulnerable in front of others. This discomfort, self-consciousness and amateurism is humanizing and extremely endearing…as well as very funny on a few occasions.

All of the real-life inmates give exceptional performances, but the most notable is Sean San Jose, who plays Mike Mike, a charismatic and charming inmate who is Divine G’s best friend.

Sing Sing has its flaws, and all those flaws fall on writer/director Greg Kwedar as they are structural in nature and diminish the film a bit, but it also has a dramatic vitality and tension to it that is uncommon, and that is to Kwedar’s credit.

Kwedar succinctly captures the prevailing sense of menace and peril of everyday life in prison as well as the suffocating sense of claustrophobia, and this imbues the film with a baseline of drama and a background of tension that befits a prison drama.

Kwedar also does a good job of showing just enough of the inmate’s performances without burdening the film with them. We get a taste and a taste is enough to maintain the spirit of the story without bogging it down in minutia.

It genuinely surprises me that Sing Sing is not nominated for Best Picture at this year's Oscars as it is a movie that would seem to be in the Academy’s sweet spot. But who knows what the Academy cares about anymore?

Regardless of what the Academy thinks, the truth is it is one of the very best films of the year and if you get a chance to see Sing Sing, whether in the theatre or on streaming/VOD, you really should. It isn’t the most deftly directed, or exquisitely acted film you’ll ever see, but it is a profound, efficient and extremely affecting one.

©2025

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota - Episode 131: A Real Pain

On this episode Barry and I mull over the Jesse Eisenberg directed arthouse darling A Real Pain, starring Best Supporting Actor Oscar nominee Kieran Culkin. Topics discussed include our happiness that the film exists, musings on the state of Kieran Culkin, and an examination of our mixed feelings on the film. 

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota - Episode 131: A Real Pain

Thanks for listening!

©2025

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota - Episode 130: Gladiator II

On this episode, Barry and I grab our swords and don our sandals to talk all things Gladiator II, the sequel to Ridley Scott's Oscar winning Gladiator from 25 years ago. Topics discussed include the brilliance of the first film, the problems with the newest film, and the dream that was Rome.

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota - Episode 130: Gladiator II

Thanks for listening!

©2025

Anora: A Review - 'Pretty Woman' for our Depraved, Disturbed, Dystopian Age

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. A funny and forthcoming film about the fairy tale of the American dream that in reality is a soul-crushing nightmare.

Anora, written and directed by Sean Baker, is a dark dramedy that chronicles the whirlwind romance between a sex worker in New York and the son of a rich Russian oligarch.

The film, which stars Mikey Madison as the title character, was just nominated for six Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actor and Best Director, and in my opinion, very deservedly so, as it is one of the very best films of the year.

Anora is, essentially, a realistic Pretty Woman set in our dystopian times. It tells the story of Anora (Mikey Madison), a stripper and sometimes “escort” who yearns for the good life and will do most anything to get it…or at least to get some money. Then she meets Vanya (Mark Eydelshteyn), the young party boy who is a Russian oligarch’s son, and the two fall headlong into an impetuous romance.  

What astonished me about Anora and the adoration it has received from the artistic community and Hollywood, was that it is subtly and surreptitiously, and maybe even unintentionally, a robust repudiation of modern feminism.

The film’s animating ideology is unquestionably a traditionalism that nowadays is considered subversive in an oddly counter culture kind of way.

Pretty Woman was the essential myth/fairy tale of the 80’s, with wealth being the symbol of happiness, wholeness and transcendence, and love being the conduit to get it. The only things that could’ve made Pretty Woman any more symbolic of the 80’s was if Julia Robert’s character falls head over heels for “greed is good” Gordon Gekko.

Anora as the myth/fairy tale of the 2020’s, is the anti-Pretty Woman, where love is non-existent and money is a toxic cancer that devours both those that have it in abundance and those so obsessed with it that they’ll sell their soul, and body, to get it.

Anora, who prefers to be called “Ani”, is the epitome of the modern woman as prostitution is empowerment. Ani controls her own body yet chooses to sell it, and more importantly her soul, for money. Sex for Ani is, always and every time, solely transactional. She may feel empowered as a modern woman, and she makes decent money selling herself, but her value and her worth diminish with every passing moment, which is why she’s so desperate to “bag a whale”…and Vanya represents her winning lottery ticket…her fairy tale come true.

I’ll refrain from going any further into the plot or twists and turns in the film so readers can enjoy it without knowing what comes next, just like I did.

I will say though that Anora is basically three films in one. The first section of it is the “modern day meet cute”…or “meet-not-so-cute” as the case may be. The second is a comedic road picture. And the third is the heart, soul and moral of the story. All three are exceedingly well-executed.

The biggest surprise for me regarding Anora was the blistering performance of Mikey Madison. Madison is not an actress I ever considered to be any good. I saw her in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood where she played one of Manson’s major minions, and thought she was actually kind of terrible. But here in Anora she is an absolute revelation.

Madison fully inhabits Anora and makes her a real, genuine human being that is so believable and so authentic I felt like I knew her from my own life…not because she’s a stripper you perverts…but because she is an archetype that so many local women in New York inhabit.  

Madison effortlessly floats in the film from the comedy to the drama and hits every note perfectly and with a gritty yet charming intensity and humanity that never wanders.

Madison is nominated for Best Actress at this year’s Academy Awards and while she probably won’t win, she definitely gives the best performance I’ve seen this year and is more than deserving of an Oscar.

The rest of the cast are fantastic as well.

Yura Borisov, who plays Igor, a Russian henchman, jumps off the screen from the get go. Borisov is nominated for Best Supporting Actor, and his soulful and still performance is stirring for any actors out there who are looking to break through in a smaller role. Borisov breaks through because he fills every moment of screen time he has with a very vivid and palpable inner life. You actually see his character thinking and gaming things out in real time, and it is compelling.

Another performance which I thought was terrific was Karren Karagulian as Toros, an Armenian handler hired by Vanya’s father to look after him. Karagulian is so good as Toros it made me giddy. He is so furious, frantic, frightened, formidable and funny that he chews through scenes like a tiger coming off a hunger strike.

Karagulian’s Toros gives a speech in a restaurant about two-thirds of the way through the film that brings the sub-text of the movie to light but it is the secondary focus of the scene and could’ve been a throwaway piece of work but Karagulian does it so well, and it feels so real and authentic that I’ve been thinking about it ever since.

Writer/director Sean Baker, is not someone that I think of, or until now, think highly of. My introduction to Baker was his 2017 film The Florida Project, which was a very ambitious and effecting arthouse movie, but one that I ultimately couldn’t get a good grip on. His follow up film, Red Rocket (2021), was very well-received by most, and while I didn’t hate it I also I didn’t love it.

Anora is Baker showing himself to be a very confident craftsman and intellectually curious artist. His filmmaking and storytelling skills on Anora are top-notch. He paces the film well and fully fleshes out every character even with a minimum of screen time. Everything is shot to feel, if not real, then at least genuine.

As previously stated, Baker using his film to challenge the current liberal orthodoxy and the corrosive spiritual nihilism of modern feminism, shows he has artistic balls the size of watermelons…but his intentional or unintentional championing of the cause of traditionalism, inflates those balls to the size of Goodyear blimps.

Anora is currently in theatres and is available to stream VOD, and I highly recommend it to both cinephiles and scions of the cineplex. It is a funny and insightful film that never pulls its punches or plays games with its audience.

A bit of a warning though, the film does have nudity and sex scenes, although nothing is particularly graphic, but it might make the more prudish a bit uncomfortable.

In conclusion, just as Pretty Woman was a soulless selling of the corporate fairy tale of the Reagan 80’s, Anora is a soulful swallowing of the reality that the fairy tale of Reaganism in the 80’s has morphed into the nightmare of Trump, and just as importantly, the liberal feminist freakout to their nightmare of Trump, in the 2020’s. It’s an important movie not just to see, but to think about and to hopefully understand.

©2025

Wolf Man: A Review – A Sheep in Wolf's Clothing

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT/SEE IT. A tepid horror tale that lacks bite. Horror aficionados can wait to watch it on streaming, everyone else can skip it altogether.

Wolf Man, written and directed by Leigh Whannell, chronicles the journey of a young family of three as they travel to a remote section of Oregon, where they try to stave off a werewolf attack.

Leigh Whannell had some success with his last film, The Invisible Man (2020), which was a modern re-telling of the 1933 Universal Film horror classic of the same name. This time out he attempts to do the same thing with the Wolf Man, a modern re-imagining the 1941 Universal classic The Wolf Man starring Lon Chaney Jr.

While Whannell’s The Invisible Man was a box office smash, making $144 million off a $7 million budget, I found the film to be a bit too heavy-handed with its feminist politics…or to be more precise…it’s male-hating politics, which were quite en vogue at the time, the height of the Trump hysteria (or so we hope).

That said, Whannell, who made his bones writing the Saw movies, displayed some nice cinematic flourishes on ocassion in The Invisible Man, so I was intrigued to see what he could do with The Wolf Man without the burden of having to frantically push a cultural and political ideology.  

I was also interested in seeing Wolf Man because I just dig monster movies. I absolutely love the Universal Classic Monster movies like Frankenstein, Dracula, The Creature from the Black Lagoon, and The Wolf Man, and I’m always fantasizing about those movies being remade in the modern era but somehow being even better. I realize that is a pipe dream, but I dream it nonetheless.

Having recently seen Robert Eggers’ outstanding remake of Nosferatu, which is essentially my monster movie remake dream come to life, I found myself excited to see the new Wolf Man.

Having seen Wolf Man, I feel foolish for having been excited for it. The film isn’t awful, but it isn’t good either. It’s a rather tepid retelling that never really grabs you by the throat and sinks its teeth into you. Its biggest sin is that it is rather blasé and bland.

The film tells the tale of the Lovell family, Blake, Charlotte and their young daughter Ginger (I’d guess she is maybe 9 years old), who live cosmopolitan lives in San Francisco. But Blake grew up with a very strict father deep in the wilds of Oregon, amidst rumors of a beast in the woods that is half-man and half-animal, and he, and frankly the rest of his family, seem pretty unhappy in the city.

While trying to figure out the status of his rocky marriage to Charlotte, Blake gets the official, and apparently long-awaited, death certificate of his father along with keys to his house in remote Oregon. To try and save their marriage, the Lovell’s decide to make a road trip for the Summer up to the Oregon house….and so their tale begins.

As is my wont, I won’t give away any spoilers whatsoever…but instead will speak in generalities.

Here are some issues with the movie.

I recently heard a discussion about werewolves that wondered whether people liked their movie werewolves to be more human than wolf or more wolf than human. I am in the more wolf than human camp, but I understand the opposing argument.

Wolf Man is definitely a more human than wolf movie, and to me that translates into it looking often-times cheap and tawdry. It doesn’t help that the make-up and special effects are, at best, uneven.

There are some very cool effects, for example shots of hands morphing were particularly quite good, but I found the rest of it less than convincing and not the least bit frightening.

Another issue, and this may be a function of the shitty movie theatres we have nowadays, but I thought the film didn’t look very good. The inability for there to be a sharp, distinct contrast between shadow and light was grating, and undermined the effectiveness of the film a tremendous amount.

All of the darkness had a hazy, smoky hue to it, which again, may not be entirely on director Whannell and his cinematographer Stefan Duscio, it could be that the projector in my theatre sucked and the idiotic theatre owners refuse to turn the lights in the theatre down all the way – a never ending frustration for me. Regardless of why the film looked so bad, the bottom line is that it looked bad.

The film also fails to fully use its setting to its advantage. The house the family are trapped in is never turned into a claustrophobic hell, as it should have been. In fact, the house seems to get bigger and bigger somehow as the movie goes along. In addition, the film never fully utilizes the inherent horror of the vast forest, particularly at night. This should be an easy thing to do, as anyone who’s ever been in the woods at night can attest, but Whannell seems disinterested in utilizing setting for horrific effect. The inability to use setting for effect leads to a muting and dispersal of tension, which is never good for a horror film.

On the other hand, there were sequences in the film that I thought were very clever, original and worked incredibly well….namely when Whannell lets us see the world through the perspective of the wolf man. This works incredibly well and not only looks really cool (and is pulled off seamlessly) but adds a significant layer of depth and drama to the film.

The cast, which features Christopher Abbot as Blake, Julia Garner as Charlotte, and Matilda Firth as Ginger, are hamstrung by a script that feels rushed, not fully fleshed out and a tad shallow.

Garner is a remarkable actress as she well established in her Emmy-winning turn on Ozark, but here she feels criminally underused, and dare I say it, slightly miscast.

Matilda Firth does her best in the child role, but it’s a child role so the less we see of her the better.

The weakest link though is Christopher Abbot as Blake. Abbot has the most work to do in the film and frankly, he just isn’t up to it. He lacks the charisma, magnetism, vivid inner life, and the primal/paternal power that is necessary for him to thrive in the role.

Ultimately, Wolf Man is a pretty forgettable film that never fully fleshes out the glorious myth at its core or the horror in its heart yearning to break free.

If you’re a horror and/or monster movie fan, I think you can skip this one in the theatres and wait to watch it when it comes to streaming. Besides that, normal movie goers and cinephiles alike have no need to see this movie as it’s a toothless horror film that lacks any and all bite.

©2025

A Real Pain: A Review - On the Same Old Road Again

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT.  A good but not great film that trods a well-worn path but features solid enough performances to be worth seeing.

A Real Pain, written and directed by Jesse Eisenberg and starring Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin, chronicles two adult cousins as they make a pilgrimage to Poland on a Holocaust tour to visit their late grandmother’s birthplace.

The film, which has a 90-minute run-time, had a limited theatrical release in November and is now available to stream on Hulu, which is where I watched it.  

A Real Pain has a lot going for it, and some things going against it.

The best thing about this movie is that it is the type of movie, a dialogue-driven ‘two-hander’ featuring two skilled actors, that doesn’t get made enough anymore but should.

A Real Pain cost $3 million to make and made $12 million at the box office, and while that won’t buy many beach houses it’s an even enough split to consider the movie well worthwhile.

In addition, the movie is adult fare, which is a rare species nowadays. It isn’t geared toward adolescents but rather toward adults, and adults who either act like adolescents or know other adults who act like adolescents.

And finally, the film features what is sure to be an Oscar nominated performance, and very likely an Oscar winning performance, from Kieran Culkin.

The film follows Eisenberg’s David and Culkin’s Benji, cousins who grew-up together but have grown apart in adulthood, as they fly from New York City to Poland and go on a Holocaust tour with a group of other Jews. There’s an older married couple, a middle-aged divorced woman, and a black African survivor of the Rwandan genocide who has converted to Judaism.

What makes the film compelling are both Culkin and Eisenberg’s performances…but what makes the film a grating experience, are the characters Culkin and Eisenberg play.

Benji is a ne’er do well narcissist and David is a neurotic nebbish, and neither of them are even remotely likable. This isn’t the fault of the actors, it’s just the reality of the characters….and I found them to be annoying as hell, which makes for a less than ideal viewing experience.

This is just me but I have never enjoyed watching Larry David or Woody Allen, and Benji and David are sort of like very, very distant cousins to Larry David and Woody Allen respectively (very, very, very distant…but relations nonetheless).

Culkin’s Benji is supposed to be charismatic in his own peculiar, truth-telling way, but I found him to be repulsive…your mileage may vary. I had no sympathy for him, or even empathy, I just wanted him to go away. David isn’t much better. He’s such a milquetoast, anxiety-ridden wet noodle that I wanted him to disappear too.

Again, and this is important to say, it’s nothing to do with the actors…both Culkin and Eisenberg deliver very solid performances. While Culkin is getting the awards mentions, Eisenberg does equally worthy, but more subtle, work.

The truth is, as good a performance as Culkin gives, there is an air of familiarity to it that feels a little shticky. Benji is, in many ways, just Culkin’s character from Succession, Roman, except Jewish and poor. Culkin’s Benji, like Roman, is quick-witted and snarky yet allegedly good-hearted and tormented. In this way, Culkin’s performance definitely feels like he’s just doing his same old shtick with minor external variances.

That said, it’s a showy, actory part, and he does it well, and I assume Culkin will win an Oscar for it…so good for him and all the more power to him.

Eisenberg has a less showy part, and as is usual with him, is much more internally focused, and he does it well. He has a monologue in a restaurant that is particularly well-done, and smart actors will use it in acting classes and auditions for the next few years.

Eisenberg also wrote and directed the film and he did well enough on both jobs. The script isn’t earth shattering but it is structured well-enough and gives some decent scenes to the actors.

The filmmaking is pretty standard as there’s nothing earth shattering visually, but the movie has a decent pace to it and feels professionally put together, so kudos to Eisenberg on his directorial debut.

Now on to a rather uncomfortable issue, and this is without question a very uncomfortable thing to feel and to discuss, and that is that A Real Pain seems like it’s yet another movie in the Holocaust Cinematic Universe.

Hollywood loves to make Holocaust movies, and that’s understandable as that vile, calamitous event is ripe with drama, but considering the times we live in, and the genocide being actively committed against Palestinians by Israeli ancestors of those who survived the Holocaust, this film’s entitled woe-is-me narrative feels painfully tone-deaf.

The tone-deafness is only accentuated by the film’s rather alarming and arrogant usurpation of the Rwandan genocide for the Jewish narrative, as if Jewishness can be the only home for suffering on such a grand scale. This is a morally insidious and ethically insipid position as it creates a self-righteousness immune from self-reflection – which is how we get an apartheid regime in Israel committing genocide, ethnic cleansing and a cavalcade of other war crimes all in the name of “Never Again” self-defense.

It would have been nice if A Real Pain had been self-aware enough to acknowledge the deeper more conflicted state of Jewishness in the world today rather retread the martyrdom narrative once again, but I suppose that is the safest and easiest path to tread, so I get it.

Despite the combustible moment in which we exist, and the film’s discomfort with this bloody moment (to be fair the film was shot before the October 7th, 2023 Hamas attack on Israel and start of the ensuing war), I thought A Real Pain was worth watching.

The film features solid performances across the board, and is geared toward adults, so that’s two wins right there.

If you have a chance check out A Real Pain on Hulu. It’s not the greatest movie you’ll ever see, and it won’t change your life, but it will hold your interest and maybe, if you get lucky, it’ll make you think just a little bit about things you don’t want to think about but should. And regardless of what conclusion you come to through this thinking, it is always good to think about things you don’t want to from time to time.

©2025

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 129 - Nightbitch

On this episode Barry and I chase our own tails trying to find something nice to say about Amy Adams' new film Nightbitch, currently streaming on Hulu. Topics discussed include the multitude of bad decisions made by the writer/director Marielle Heller, Amy Adams' career decline, and the missed opportunity of a arthouse or body horror "mother" movie. 

And finally, stay 'til the end of the pod for a tribute to the great filmmaker David Lynch.

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 129 - Nightbitch

Thanks for listening!

©2025

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 128 - Carry-On

On the premier episode of season six of Looking California and Feeling Minnesota, Barry and I wait in a long security line at LAX and talk all things Carry-On, the new Netflix action movie starring Taron Egerton. Topics discussed include missed cinematic opportunities, the business sweet spot for Netflix, and the brilliance of Die Hard - and to a lesser extent Die Hard II.

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 128 - Carry-On

Thanks for listening!

©2025

Nightbitch: A Review - This Mangy Dog Won't Hunt

****THIS REVIEW CONTAINS PLOT POINTS AND MILD SPOILERS!! THEREFORE: THIS IS TECHNICALLY NOT A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!!****

My Rating: 1 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. Flaccid and flavorless feminist gruel.

Nightbitch, starring Amy Adams, chronicles the weird and wild travails of a mother as she navigates raising a toddler, perimenopause and the modern world.

Nightbitch, which is written and directed by Marielle Heller and is adapted from the Rachel Yoder book of the same name, describes itself as a “black comedy horror” film. I take umbrage with that description since the movie is not funny, darkly or otherwise, nor is it horrifying….it’s just bad.

Nightbitch starts out in quite compelling fashion as Amy Adams’ character, simply named “mother”, struggles with the mind-numbing repetitiveness and inanity of raising a toddler, in this case her son, named, “baby”. Mother’s husband, who goes by the clever moniker “husband”, is away for work from Monday to Thursday so mother must do everything on her own.

A very interesting premise and a captivating first twenty minutes about the unique difficulties of raising a toddler quickly gets derailed when a tsunami of heavy-handed, insipid, intellectual and dramatic vapidity and vacuity around gender roles and modern-day feminism comes to the fore.

The movie shifts from arthouse realism into the mire of symbolism and surreality, as mother starts to show the early signs of morphing into a dog. Again, this could’ve been a nice segue into a “body-horror” type of cinematic exploration, but instead this metamorphosis ultimately is used just as “woman tapping into her primal power” symbolism, which is about as original, interesting and captivating as watching a dog take a shit on your lawn.

This movie could have, and frankly should have, been a serious and slightly comedic meditation on how devastatingly difficult it is for women to mother a toddler in the modern world. Or it could have, and should have, been a body horror film about a woman losing herself, physically, mentally, emotionally, and artistically to motherhood and menopause/middle-age. But it is neither…it is a pitiful and pedantic tantrum by a middle-aged woman angry at her intellectual and artistic impotence and her career and familial failures and needing to blame anyone but herself.

It is also so archetypally and mythologically obtuse and contrary to collective human consciousness and conditioning as to be astounding. For example, why is a woman seeking to connect with her primal power, morphing into a dog? Dogs are pack animals and are usually led by an alpha male…so even in this feminist fantasy film, the dream is of being a male instead of an empowered female. Odd.

Another issue is the tone deafness of the class politics of the film. Mother, and all the mothers in the movie by the way, live some of the most privileged lives imaginable. They are rich enough to be afforded the option of not working and staying home to raise their children. This used to be standard operating procedure here in America, but in the last fifty years it has become a sign of rare privilege and less and less likely.

Mother is completely unaware of how spoiled she is as she lives this extraordinarily privileged life and yet still manages to wallow in her narcissistic melancholy and navel-gazing ennui. She is, at a minimum, an upper-middle class woman who can afford to not have a job and stay at home and raise her one child. The child, by the way, is so well-behaved as to be absurd, and yet still she can’t handle it.

This flaccid film is so unconscionably blind to class politics because it is designed to be nothing more than a vehicle for some of the most-trite and laughably moronic modern feminist politics imaginable.

The eye-rolling level of cringe in this movie becomes nearly unavoidable as it rolls along. For example, mother is an artist…because of course she is since she’s never actually worked a day in her life…and she’s also a former Mennonite…because of course she is because she has to be connected to some weirdly archaic lifestyle and religious background. And of course her husband is one of those pussified eunuchs who lacks both balls and any semblance of muscle tone or masculinity, who serves little to no purpose in mother or baby’s life except for supplying food, clothing and shelter.

The relationship between mother and husband says a great deal about the film. When mother and husband argue it’s because he’s an idiot and thoughtless and selfish, not because she is spoiled and irrational (which she is).

Mother was an artist “in the city” but wanted to stay home with the baby and gave up her career to do so. Husband is the bread winner….as they both agreed upon prior to the baby being born. But now she regrets that decision and somehow it is all husband’s fault for not being able to both read her mind and see into the future.

Mother decides she is unhappy and it’s all husband’s fault because he gave her everything she ever wanted…but it wasn’t what she wanted. So, she says raising this child on her own is too difficult so she wants to get separated…which will really solve the issue of being overwhelmed by having to take care of a child by yourself by removing the other adult in the equation. Brilliant….or should I say “great idea stupid bitch”.

And then…for some strange reason because he’s the one who makes money and has always been the one making money and it’s his fucking house…he moves out into an apartment complex with all the other divorced/separated dads. How about this nightbitch…it’s his fucking house and you’re the one with the problem, so you get the fuck out…how does that sound you hairy fucking mongrel? But no, Mr. Limp Dick puts his tail between his legs and goes to sleep in his race car bed in his studio apartment with all the other sad sacks at the singles complex. Pathetic.

Mother then spends her time getting back in touch with her primal nature – morphing into a dog and hunting with the pack late at night. She also spends time with other moms who all agree that “women are gods” and that “women create life!” The funny thing about this sort of bumper sticker feminism is that it is so stupid it makes my teeth hurt. For example, women don’t create life…men AND women create life…women carry it in their bodies after men inseminate them. Sort of a big difference. Also…why do I have to explain 5th grade biology to this idiotic movie?

Mother, now free on the weekends because exceedingly well behaved baby is busy overwhelming incompetent husband at the single’s complex, creates a massive amount of art that celebrates the power of mothers, and she puts on a big art show and presents in the suburbs. The art mother makes is so laughably bad, pretentious, derivative and trite it makes a toddler’s play-dough snake look like Michelangelo. The banal atrocity that is mother’s art is obvious to everyone watching the movie but apparently no one involved in making the movie. But the lesson of all this nonsensical junk is that mother can only be her true goddess self without that useless husband around…and even more menacingly…without that annoying baby occupying her precious time too.

On the bright side, Nightbitch is a wonderful encapsulation of how modern feminism teaches women to be deathly allergic to responsibility and to blame others for their personal, political, artistic and financial failures.

The “patriarchy” that the nightbitches scapegoat are made up of the rough men they love to loathe, but these are the men who carved out a place for these feckless women to live their silly, mindless, meaningless lives the way they choose…and yet still, all they can do is bitch about it.

Writer/director Marielle Heller, is one of those less-than-talented people who somehow, almost magically, con people into thinking they have actual talent. Trust me, she doesn’t have an ounce of it.

Nightbitch fits right in with Heller’s flimsy filmography, which includes Can You Ever Forgive Me? and A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, because like all the other movies, it’s a mind-numbing, sub-mediocrity. It is poorly shot, poorly written, poorly executed and devoid of any real purpose or meaning except to pose as having a deep purpose or meaning.

Amy Adams is an actress I have always liked but she is on one hell of a streak of shitty movies. Her last decent movie was Arrival, and that was in 2016!

Adams dives right in to her role here as mother, and apparently gained weight for the role, which is ironic because the film is so philosophically and cinematically weightless.

She does the best she can with what she’s given but it never coalesces into a coherent or compelling performance. There is no arc, no insight, no genuine humanity or behavior. Everything feels like Amy Adams play-acting as a middle-aged feminist avatar.

Adams seems to be in a very disorienting career death spiral which started out with her aggressively attempting to finally win an Oscar after six nominations, and has morphed into her desperately flailing away in an attempt to save her moribund career.

Nightbitch was released into theatres on December 6th, which is ironic because that is one day before Pearl Harbor Day and this movie was a massive, massive bomb. The only difference between this movie and Pearl Harbor is that people paid attention to Pearl Harbor.

The film had a budget of $25 million and it made measly $170,000 at the box office. It didn’t make that its opening day, or even opening weekend, that’s how little it made in the entirety of its run. $170,000. YIKES!

A flop this bad and a box office bomb this big can be career death for a movie star and a moviemaker. Adams and Heller are on very thin ice going forward.

The film is now available to stream on Hulu…but as you may have guessed, you really don’t need to stream it. It’s stupid and even worse, it’s pointless AND gutless.

The topic of the struggle of motherhood in all its complexities is one ripe for exploration, but Nightbitch ain’t that. This movie is so toothless, so artless and so thoughtless, that it is anti-cinema made manifest. Avoid it at all costs.

©2025

A Complete Unknown: A Review - A Bob Dylan Bio-Pic Blowin' in the Wind

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT/SEE IT. A painfully formulaic music bio-pic, that features great music, but that refuses to do anything but paint-by-numbers. Skip it in the theatre and see it on streaming.

A Complete Unknown, starring Timothee Chalamet, chronicles Bob Dylan’s rise to fame from his beginnings in 1961 to his iconic performance at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965.

The film, which is directed by James Mangold and co-written by Mangold and Jay Cocks, opens with Dylan moving to New York City and making a pilgrimage to see the godfather of American folk music, Woody Guthrie, as he lay in dire straits in a hospital bed.

It is at the hospital that Dylan meets both the infirm Guthrie as well as his friend, esteemed folk musician Pete Seeger, and plays a song for them both which impresses them no end. And off to the races goes Bob Dylan’s career.

On the journey of this film, we get to see Bob mix and mingle with such musical stalwarts as Joan Baez and Johnny Cash as well as Seeger and Guthrie. We also get glimpses of his personal life and his relationships with both Baez and Sylvie Russo (in real life this character is Dylan’s girlfriend Suze Rotolo), and his struggle and sometimes delight in making it big.

We also get to the standard music biopic touchstones where a guy-writing-songs is interspersed with great historical moments of the time. So, there’s memory lane type moviemaking where Dylan writes this great song and everybody knowingly looks at each other, and then the Cuban Missile Crisis happens, and he writes another great song and everybody knowingly looks at each other, and then the JFK assassination happens and Dylan writes another great song and everybody knowingly looks at each other…and on and on and on.

What we don’t see in the film is any real glimpse of Bob Dylan behind the well-defined public persona. In public life Dylan has long been a distant, aloof, morose and surly entity…and he remains one throughout the entirety of this rigidly formulaic film.

The music bio-pic is such a standard of Hollywood that it feels like self-parody at this point, and A Complete Unknown adheres to the well-worn, paint-by-numbers music biopic approach from start to finish.

Are there bright spots in the film? Sure.

First off, while I am no superfan of Bob Dylan, I do like his music a great deal and the music in this movie is well executed and presented. You can’t help but tap your feet and nod along to the renditions of Dylan’s famous and fantastic songs…of which there are a shockingly high number.

Secondly, there are a few good performances in the movie. The most notable to me is a very nuanced and subtle performance from Edward Norton as Pete Seeger.

Norton’s Seeger is a gentle soul that conceals a fiery spirit with which Seeger is exceedingly uncomfortable. Norton gives Seeger a delicate touch but there is something in his gentility that is fierce and undeniable.

Norton gets overlooked a lot, and is widely considered a pain in the ass by the powers that be in Hollywood, but make no mistake, when he is locked-in he is a terrific actor, and he is locked-in here as Seeger.

Another bright spot is that Timothee Chalamet, to his great credit, actually plays guitar and sings for his performance as Dylan. Nothing would’ve been worse than to have a fake-nose wearing Chalamet lip-sync his way through Dylan’s early catalogue. Chalamet singing and playing gives the music a rawness that adds to the authenticity of an otherwise rather inauthentic movie.

To be clear, in terms of the acting, Chalamet does a good impression of Bob Dylan, but due to the limitations of the script, the performance never moves beyond imitation. He is restricted by the script from delving too deeply into Dylan as a human being, and is forced to stick with Dylan as musical genius.

Timothee Chalamet, or as I prefer to call him – “Little Timmy”, has always been a bit of a mystery to me. Critics and industry people fawn all over him like he’s the love child of James Dean and Leonardo DiCaprio. In my less than humble opinion, he’s never been very good in anything I’ve seen him do, with the lone exception of a commercial for Apple TV (in which he is excellent).

I assume Little Timmy will win the Academy Award for Best Actor for his work as Bob Dylan. It’s one of those roles that Hollywood loves to celebrate because it pays homage to an icon, Dylan, and gives praise to a young actor they want to turn into the next big movie star.

Little Timmy has definitely positioned himself well for the moment and in his career, and is poised in Hollywood eyes for winning an Oscar, but whether he’ll actually prove himself to be a great actor, or a great movie star, over the next decades, remains to be seen. Consider me skeptical.

The rest of the cast do decent enough work in rather thankless roles.

For example, the usually stellar Elle Fanning, who was so remarkable in the tv series The Great, is under-utilized and reduced to the one-dimensional girlfriend role of Sylvie. Fanning does what she can with the very little she’s given…but boy there’s not much for her to do.

The same is true of Monica Barbaro as Joan Baez. Barbaro does do a good job singing in Baez’s beautiful style, but beyond that she is given gruel on which to feed.

Boyd Holbrook plays Johnny Cash, and he does well enough with very little. One of the funniest moments in the movie is when Holbrook’s Cash tries to move his car at the Newport Festival. If you’ll remember, director Mangold made the Johnny Cash bio-pic Walk the Line, which garnered Joaquin Phoenix a Best Actor nomination in 2005. (It would’ve been amusing to me if Mangold went full Mangold Music Bio-pic Cinematic Universe – MMBPCU - and had Phoenix play the small role of Johnny Cash in this movie.)

But even the bright spots of this film aren’t particularly bright, which is often an issue with a formulaic music bio-pic.

The bottom line regarding A Complete Unknown is that it is, as a cinematic venture, unlike Bob Dylan’s discography, pretty forgettable. But the reality is that most people will go and hear the great music and enjoy the movie for the mediocrity that it is…and there’s nothing wrong with that.

In my screening there were a bevy of people in Dylan’s age group (their 80s) who cheered rapturously when the movie ended…and who also spoke ridiculously loudly during the duration of the film. These folks don’t need the movie to be good or even interesting, they just need it to be a nostalgia delivery machine…and they got what they wanted.

Ultimately, I enjoyed listening to Bob Dylan’s music for a couple hours while a middling movie played out before me. I assume anyone who loves or even likes Bob Dylan’s music will feel the same way.

That said, the reality is that A Complete Unknown is a generic, safe and very middling affair that is buoyed by Bob Dylan’s musical brilliance. Because of that, I would say that if you want to see it, save your money and the annoyance of a theatre outing and wait until it hits a streaming service to watch it.

©2024

Nosferatu: A Review - Beautiful, Brilliant and Bloodthirsty

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 4.25 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. A masterfully-made arthouse horror movie that features exquisite craftsmanship.

I went to a small arthouse theater here in flyover country last night to see Robert Eggers’ new film Nosferatu, which is a remake of the 1922 F.W. Murnau silent film classic of the same name.

My theater going experience was, to say the least, not very conducive to a positive cinematic experience. First off, the theater across the hall from my screening was playing the Bob Dylan bio-pic A Complete Unknown, and so my often-silent screening of Nosferatu many times had an unintentional bass line accompanying it courtesy of Mr. Dylan.

Secondly, despite being the only people in the theater at the start of the screening, my wife and I were soon joined by a cavalcade of dimwits and dipshits in our small screening room once the film began. A couple in their mid-60’s sat in the row in front of us off to the right and decided this theater was their living room and chatted freely and loudly. Another man, by himself, sat in the row in front of us to our left and after downing a bag of popcorn and drinking a canned iced tea, proceeded to sanitize his hands and compulsively rub them together literally every ten minutes for the duration of the film. The medicated stench of the sanitizer did not add to our enjoyment of the film.

And yet…despite all of the morons and miscreants around us and the uninvited bass line, I still found myself under the spell of the arthouse horror of Nosferatu as its the mesmerizing mastery played out before me.

The original Nosferatu is a truly staggering cinematic achievement. Director Murnau is one of the most influential filmmakers of the German Expressionist era. I saw Murnau’s Nosferatu for the first time in the early 1990’s and was blown away by it. It is essential viewing for anyone interesting in making, or understanding, cinema.

Robert Eggers’ remake is not as colossal a cinematic document as Murnau’s, but it is very impressive nonetheless. What is so remarkable about this new version is that Eggers’ Nosferatu is one of the most magnificently crafted films in recent memory.

The film is bursting with a bevy of extraordinary craftsmanship, from its cinematography to its costume and set design, that is exhilarating for a cinephile. Unfortunately, for whatever reason (and there are a myriad of them), craftsmanship of this level is rarely seen in films anymore.

Jarin Blaschke’s cinematography is astonishing as the film is gorgeously photographed. His framing and composition, use of shadow and light, and deft camera movements make for a phenomenal visual feast of a film.

Robert Eggers’ and Blaschke’s clarity of vision, precision and attention to detail are extraordinary. The film is not black and white, like the original, but it is dark…but unlike so many modern movies, the darkness does not lack distinction. In other words, you can actually see despite – or in some cases – because, of the darkness.

Blaschke’s cinematography and muted color palette, combined with the locations, sets and costumes, along with Eggers’ gothic brilliance, set an unsettling mood for the movie which is more-creepy than it is scary.

If you know the original Nosferatu, or are familiar with the Bram Stoker novel Dracula, you’ll know the plot of this film, so there will be no twists or surprises, but thanks to Eggers’ mastery, you’ll still be compelled to watch.

The cast all acquit themselves well, but it is Lily Rose Depp (daughter of Johnny Depp) as Ellen, who stands above the rest with a truly superb performance. Depp is asked to do quite a bit and she is fearless in tackling all of the madness required of her. Depp is unleashed, physically, emotionally, artistically, and she devours the role with a ferocious aplomb.

Depp’s Ellen is the embodiment of repressed female sexuality in the Victorian era. The men in her life restrain her, numb her, drug her, chastise her, shame her and ignore her. But the sexual beast within her, which has called Nosferatu forth, simply cannot be denied.

Nicholas Hoult plays Thomas, Ellen’s husband, and he is fantastic as essentially the cuckold to Nosferatu. Thomas is afraid…of everything, and Hoult brings that fear to life in a captivating, and never mannered, way.

Thomas loves Ellen, of that there is no doubt, but he is rudderless when it comes to navigating the intricacies of the staid business world as well as his wife’s carnal needs.

Aaron Taylor Johnson, Emma Corrin, and Willem Dafoe all give deliciously theatrical performances as Friedrich, Anna, and Dr. von Franz respectively.

Dafoe, if you’ll recall, starred as Max Shreck in Shadow of the Vampire back in 2000 – a fictional (and clever) re-telling of the making of Murnau’s Nosferatu. Now here he is playing a German version of Von Helsing in the remake. It never fails to amuse me that Willem Dafoe has become the go to eccentric character actor of our time…it also never fails to please me.

Bill Skarsgard plays Count Orlack/Nosferatu in all his grotesqueness and is magnificently menacing. Skarsgard’s voice is unnervingly demonic and matches his ungodly and ungainly physicality.

The vampire has long been a symbol of repressed sexual energy…which is why it was such a potent myth in Victorian era. Count Orlock/Nosferatu, is not a sexy and suave lady killer like Dracula, instead he is a demon and beast…a sub-conscious symbol of repressed sexuality.

Ellen’s sexual energy is stifled at an early age under the repressive mores of her time, but it is released when she calls forth the beast Nosferatu…a shadow creature who dwells in psychological darkness where unspoken and unacknowledged desires reside.

As Thomas says to Ellen after she speaks of her calling forth the demon in her youth – “let’s never speak of it again” – which of course leaves it in the psychological shadow which will only further empower the beastly demon.

Eggers’ re-telling of the Nosferatu/Dracula/vampire story goes, unsurprisingly, deep into the lore and the core of vampire mythology. Thanks to this much of the Hollywood stuff we’ve grown accustomed to is gone. For example, there are no wooden stakes or flying bats in Nosferatu…but there are rats…lots and lots and lots of rats.

Eggers is a filmmaker who has a distinct style that some consider an acquired taste. If that is true then I have, for the most part, acquired it. I was blown away by Eggers’ moody first film, The Witch, but was disappointed by his second effort, The Lighthouse, which just wasn’t for me.

I really enjoyed his third film The Northman, but the movie flopped and I was worried what he would or could do next to keep his artistry and his career afloat. Thankfully he’s now given us Nosferatu, which while it isn’t a truly great film, it is so exceptionally made and is doing well-enough at the box office, that Eggers will continue to do his cinematic thing for the foreseeable future, which makes me happy.  

Genuine auteurs are tough to find nowadays, and auteurs with exquisite artistic sensibilities and craftsmanship are even more rare. Eggers is all of the above, and when you consider his unique cinematic style and taste in projects, he really comes to the forefront as one of our treasured filmmakers…even if he isn’t blowing up the box office or winning Academy Awards.

In conclusion, Nosferatu may not interest normal people, or it may be too dark for the cineplex crowd, but it is a masterful piece of moviemaking that should be celebrated and encouraged.

Nosferatu was the best movie I’ve seen this year because it was the best made-movie I’ve seen this year. If you like cinematic excellence, even when it comes in the form of a remake of a one-hundred-year-old silent horror classic, then this movie is for you.

And finally, while I heartily recommend David Eggers’ new arthouse horror version of Nosferatu to those with the taste for it, I also highly recommend the original 1922 Nosferatu by F.W. Murnau, but that I recommend for everyone…as it’s something everybody needs to see at least once in their life (and it is streaming on Amazon Prime!!).

©2024

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 127 - Juror #2

On this episode, Barry and I are judge, jury and executioner for Clint Eastwood's latest directorial effort, Juror #2, now streaming on Max. Topics discussed include Clint's laissez-faire approach with actors and his baffling filmography, Warner Brother's poor executive leadership, and the 30 Rock "Rural Juror" joke. Bonus segment at the end about the just-released trailer for James Gunn's new Superman movie. 

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 127 - Juror #2

Thanks for listening!

©2024

Carry On: A Review - The Movie Equivalent of Airplane Food

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. Nothing to see here. Flaccid formula film with sub-par action – in other words…just more cheap Netflix nonsense.

Carry On, starring Taran Egerton, is a Netflix action thriller where a TSA agent at LAX must thwart an elaborate terror attack on Christmas Eve.

The film, which has a two-hour runtime, premiered on Netflix on December 13th and has been their most watched film since.

I won’t reveal much about the plot of Carry On in order to maintain its thriller’s edge for those interested in seeing it, but the basic premise is that Ethan Kopek (Egerton) is a police academy dropout and middling TSA agent. After finding out on Christmas Eve that his girlfriend Nora (Sofia Carson) is pregnant, he decides to dedicate himself to his job and prove his worth.

Unfortunately for Ethan, Christmas Eve is one of the busiest travels of the year and it’s also the day a mysterious bunch of terrorists have a big terror attack planned which includes using a TSA agent as an unwilling pawn.

The film, which is directed by Jaume Collet-Serra, is meant to be a sort of clever twist on the original Die Hard formula – remember Die Hard is a Christmas movie too, but trust me when I tell you that Carry On is no Die Hard. In fact, Carry On couldn’t carry Die Hard‘s ample jock strap.

Carry On attempts to be an action thriller but is undermined by the fact that the action is repeatedly passe and the thrills decidedly muted.

For example, there’s one big action sequence in a car where Wham’s iconic hit Last Christmas plays that I am sure the filmmakers thought was so original, amazing and awesome, but which I found visually dull and dramatically flaccid.

The thriller angle to Carry On is thwarted because the movie just isn’t taut enough, it is a bit too preposterous and a bit too flabby around the gut.

Director Collet-Serra’s last film was the god-awful Dwayne Johnson super hero vehicle Black Adam, and Carry On has a similar whiff of poor direction to it as that movie. Everything in the film is never quite good enough or interesting enough or well-executed enough. It’s just a serious of sub-par sequences that add up to an entirely forgettable movie.

Taron Egerton has been injected into our lives as a “movie star”, or at the very least a “potential movie star”, but frankly, I don’t see it just yet. He’s certainly ambitious but his ambition far outweighs his charisma and/or charm.

As Ethan, Egerton reminds me of Sam Worthington, another guy who they tried to make a star but who just wasn’t up to it. Worthington, who has gone on to star in the Avatar films, was shoved down our throats for a few years, but after repeated failures settled into the Avatar gig. Worthington took a different track than Egerton and ultimately found a home as a CGI lead actor. Egerton, on the other hand, has tried to be a movie star and an award worthy actor but he is neither, as he is both a bit wooden and a bit too histrionic for either assignment.

Jason Bateman plays one of the bad guys and he is just…fine. Bad Bateman is definitely the best Bateman and yet his character is never fully utilized in a way that would let him truly shine or even steal the film, something of which he is entirely capable.

Ethan’s girlfriend, Nora, is played by Sofia Carson and she is not particularly good in a very poorly written part.

The rest of the other performances are cringe-worthy attempts. There’s the hip-hop TSA agent, there’s the tough as nails LAPD detective, there’s the nice guy best friend, the bad guy boss, the gay guy, the other gay guy and all the rest and none of them seem remotely real or interesting.

The most frustrating thing about Carry On is that there really is a kernel of a terrific movie hidden underneath all the nonsense. The premise of a TSA agent dealing with a very smart and savvy terror group during the Christmas season has great potential…which is why Die Hard is so iconic.

But Carry On fails to fully flesh out its premise and use it to cinematic and dramatic ends. The potential of Carry On dies on the vine because director Collet-Serra simply lacks the skill, talent, craftsmanship and vision to make it anything more than, at best, a derivative piece of empty Netflix calories.

If you like waiting around at the airport for two-hours for your delayed flight to Dayton to come in, then Carry On is the movie for you. If you like precise thrillers filled with clever, heart-pounding action, then you should check your luggage because Carry On is not the route you wanna go.

The bottom line is that Carry On is a throwaway piece of moviemaking that never fails to underwhelm. If you want to enjoy your holiday season…skip Carry On.

On that joyous note I want to wish all of you a very Merry Christmas!!

©2024

UFO Week - The Program: A Documentary Review

UFO WEEK - THE PROGRAM

My Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. An informative and worthy effort from James Fox, one of the very best ufo documentarians in the business.

Day five of UFO Week is here and today we review the highly anticipated new James Fox documentary, The Program, which was released on December 16th and is available on video on demand.

James Fox is unquestionably one of the very best ufo documentarians working today. He has made five UFO related documentaries in the last twenty-seven years, with The Program being his sixth.

Not all of Fox’s UFO documentaries have worked, but the ones that have, like Out of the Blue (2003), I Know What I Saw (2009) and The Phenomenon (2020), are among the very best ever made.

Fox’s most recent film, Moment of Contact, was a major disappointment as it never fully came together as a noteworthy cinematic venture, and so I was very apprehensive about his newest film.

I am glad to say that The Program, while not nearly as good as the masterpiece that is Out of the Blue, is certainly a top-notch document and important piece of the UFO puzzle for any interested in a serious examination of the topic.

The film, which runs a brisk one hour and forty-two-minutes, opens with a discussion of the “Wilson Memo”, a 2002 memo allegedly sent between Admiral Wilson and astrophysicist Eric Davis regarding the secret UFO programs run by various black budget government agencies in conjunction with aerospace and military contracting companies.

The story goes from there and includes discussions with such serious luminaries as Dr. Gary Nolan of Stanford University and Hal Puthoff, as well as lesser-known insiders like former intelligence agency analyst Lenval Logan, DOD research scientist Sarah Gamm, and former Asst Deputy Secretary of Defense Christopher Mellon.

Logan and Gamm in particular make for compelling subjects as they seem like smart people trying to tell the truth while trying to avoid saying anything that would violate any oaths or NDA’s they have signed.

Mellon has become a mainstay in UFO discussions and documentaries and he gives a good interview as he comes across as serious as can be without being a fanatic. That said, I’m a bit wary of the guy with his intelligence background and his insanely rich family background (he comes from the Mellon banking dynasty).

One of Fox’s real strong points as a filmmaker is his ability to properly pace a documentary. His good films flow with an effortlessness that is compelling, and The Program is no exception.

While Fox does appear in many of his films, he is most successful when he is not the protagonist, but just an observer/interviewer.

To his great credit, Fox is masterful with his direct yet easy-going interview style, and he gets the most out of his subjects as is possible.

Another subject examined in the film is the case of Gary McKinnon, a British hacker who broke into U.S. government computer systems searching for secret UFO stuff…and found it. And for his trouble he was arrested and faced extradition and life in prison in the U.S.

What McKinnon discovered hidden away in the government vaults, besides a crystal-clear photo of a UFO, was a list of “non-terrestrial officers” which included names. Quite the unnerving find.

The film then stays in the UK and transitions to a case in Calvine, Scotland where in August of 1990, two Scotsmen photographed a UFO. The British government confiscated their pictures…but one savvy officer held one for himself and kept for thirty years, finally releasing it in recent years.

The photo is extraordinarily good, the story of the two men who took it as told by one of their co-workers, is not. The co-worker sounds like a drunk making up a story as he goes along…and it would’ve been better leaving him on the cutting room floor entirely.

Another issue with the film is the story of Jason Sands, a former-USAF airmen who worked at infamous Area 51. Sands, who was vetted and recently gave private testimony to congress, has footage of a UFO at a firing range, and tells a strange story of an interaction with an alien.

Sands’ story of his alien interaction is definitely outlandish, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t true. Unfortunately, after having watched the film, I’ve since seen Sands interviewed elsewhere where he tells even more outrageous tales about having to execute an alien at the behest of his superiors in order to guarantee his silence about the program in which he worked. This story is just a bridge too far and makes Sands sound like a committed fabulist or a fabulist who should be committed. I wonder if he told that same tale to Fox and Fox wisely kept it out of his film or if it is a new revelation? Either way, I think in terms of credibility it probably would’ve been better for Fox to keep Sands out of his documentary entirely.

The final portion of the The Program deals with the deep state obstruction of disclosure and features the always reliable Rep. Tim Burchett and Mellon describing the undemocratic government within a government that keeps all the secrets. (As an aside about Burchett, I was recently watching an episode of Finding Bigfoot with my son, an Animal Planet reality tv series from the 2010s – and in one episode the crew goes to Knox County, Tennessee to search for bigfoot and the mayor of Knox County – good old Tim Burchett, is there to help out and discuss his interest in the subject. I wholly endorse him being named director of the Federal Department of the Weird, Wild and Wonderful.)

There’s also a very damning display from the repugnant Bill Nelson, a former Senator from Florida and now head of NASA, who puts on a bullshit display that is so transparently dishonest and full of bureaucratic bluster that it is painful to watch. That Fox himself questions Nelson in an open forum, and then does a split-screen between Nelson blatantly lying about whistleblower David Grusch, and Grusch speaking to congress, is a master stroke.

The reality is that deep state despots like Bill Nelson, Admiral Wilson and their ilk are the tyrants of our age. These unelected bullying bureaucrats run the security and surveillance state that is antithetical to democracy and a republic and keeps us in the dark and in our cage.

The Program is about the UFO programs that men like Nelson and Wilson control, and the knowledge they refuse to share because that knowledge is power and they will never give up their unearned power.

The Program is a solid, well-made documentary that is well-worth watching. Unfortunately, it is only available to purchase and not rent, and the purchase price is $17...pretty steep.

The film will no doubt be available to rent at a much cheaper price in the coming weeks, and as good as I think it is, I think it’s worth waiting to rent it a cheaper price than buy at a steep one.

The bottom line is this, The Program is a very good companion piece to Fox’s earlier films, Out of the Blue, I Know What I Saw and The Phenomenon. As a collection, these films make a great starting point for newbies to the subject, and an excellent library of information for more experienced ufologists.

©2024

UFO Week - Battle for Disclosure : A Documentary Review

UFO WEEK - BATTLE FOR DISCLOSURE

My Rating: 1/2 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. Another in a long line of self-serving, money-grab documentaries from the narcissistic to the point of being messianic, Dr. Steven Greer.

Day four of UFO Week is here and today’s topic is the newest documentary from legendary ufologist Steven Greer, Battle for Disclosure.

The film, which runs one hour and forty-one minutes and is directed by Brent and Blake Cousins, was released on December 10th and is available to rent on video on demand. I rented it the day it came out and paid $1.99, but I have since went back to check the price and has been listed at $9.99 one day and $3.99 another.

The hard truth is the film isn’t worth $1.99, nevermind $9.99 or $3.99.

Steven Greer has produced a bevy of documentaries in recent years. The Lost Century: And How to Reclaim It (2023), Contact: The CE-5 Experience (2023), UFO: Endgame to Disclosure (2023), The Cosmic Hoax: An Expose (2021), Close Encounters of the Fifth Kind (2020), Unacknowledged (2017) and Siruis (2013) are among the titles.

These films all share one very prominent feature…namely Steven Greer talking mostly about Steven Greer and how much Steven Greer knows.

If you don’t know who Steven Greer is…here is a primer. Steven Greer, or more accurately Dr. Steven Greer, is a physician turned ufologist who claims to have been an advisor of sorts to numerous presidents and governments officials over the years on the subject of ufos. How he became so close to the halls of power has never adequately been explained, but Greer does have pictures of himself with various big wigs, so there’s that.

Greer claims he saw a ufo as a kid and again as a teen and that he has some deep connection with them. Apparently, it is a very strong connection because he actually claims to be able to summon them.

And thus, we get to the crux of Dr. Greer. Dr. Greer has the distinct whiff of the grift to him, and that stench is quite odious. Greer obviously has a messiah complex as indicated by the fact that he, and he alone, has been bequeathed special powers and the he, and he alone, is the holder of special, secret knowledge. In this way Greer’s school of ufology feels more like a cult than a scientific exploration.

Greer’s ufo thesis is that aliens are a benevolent bunch who want to give humanity free energy technology that will release us from the bondage of our evil overlords and unleash a utopia here on earth. To be clear…I WANT Greer’s thesis to be correct. But Greer is such a shady character and seeming charlatan that I can’t help but dismiss his ideas even when some of them are somewhat believable.

For example, in Battle for Disclosure, Greer talks about how a lot of ufo sightings are actually human made crafts that were reverse engineered from alien craft byu a dep state cabal. Greer’s argument is that these human-made ufos are “illegal”…and he can “prove it in a court of law”, because the government didn’t disclose the technology…or something like that.

Greer’s legal grandstanding feels like just another example of his messiah complex…like who gives a shit if Steven Greer can “prove in a court of law” that the dark deep state is up to ufo shenanigans…because you aren’t going to get it into a court of law…that’s how the game works.

Throughout the film Greer, with a peculiar, ever-present and diabolically persistent, booger-free nose hair saluting out of his left nostril, declares that HE could prove his case in court…but then never actually meticulously makes his case for the cameras.

Battle for Disclosure is structured in such a way that it is obviously made for people who have been closely following Greer’s films and philosophy over the years. It hits the ground running from the get go and doesn’t give much context, expecting viewers to know the backstory already.

In another peculiar move, Greer goes out of his way in the first third of the film to berate, diminish and ultimately dismiss journalist Ross Coulthart, and whistleblowers David Grusch and Lue Elizondo as deceptive scions of the deep state. He doesn’t specifically lay out his case against them but just attacks them.

Now, many of my friends in the ufo community (I have a lot of them), think very highly of people like Grusch and Elizondo and Christopher Mellon. They are all in on these guys and hang on their every word. I, on the other hand, am not and do not. I look at these characters with the most jaundiced of eyes. I don’t trust them because to trust members, or former members, of the intelligence community, is a fool’s errand. These people are professional liars and they are very good at manipulation. To be clear, I don’t dismiss everything they say out of hand, I am just skeptical of what they say and more importantly, why they may be saying it.

The problem, of course, is that Greer attacking Elizondo and Grusch and their ilk without making a viable and clear case against them, doesn’t do much to damage their credibility nor does it elevate his…it just makes him seem petty and jealous of all the mainstream attention those guys get.

In the last third of the film the narrative shifts to a collection of men recounting their experiences with ufos of one type or another. These men, all military men at the time of their encounters, tell compelling but often-times preposterous tales – all of which Greer substantiates through his alleged unnamed insider sources in the deep state.

The first story is from former US Marine Michael Herrera, who claims to have stumbled upon a human trafficking operation in Indonesia run by black ops guys that used ufo/alien tech. He said his superiors were pissed at him and his team about their discovery and told him to keep his mouth shut.

Another story was told by DC Long, who while working on a military base saw technology that could use some strange sound wave technology of some sort to lift massive blocks of granite. When Long refused to sign an NDA regarding what he saw, the government destroyed his father’s construction business and confiscated all his equipment. Long’s father never spoke to him again until he was on his deathbed.

The third story is from Steven Digna Jr., who saw a ufo while doing live fire drills on a military base. Digna is in such a diminished physical and mental state at the time of shooting his interview, that it is preceded by a disclaimer of sorts telling the viewer that these guys have been through the ringer and it’s taken a deadly toll on their lives.

Digna’s story is, frankly, the most believable, but he is in such a fragile physical and emotional state it is difficult to watch him or to know if he is telling the truth.

The final story comes from Eric Hecker, who worked for the Navy and Raytheon and went to Antarctica to work security there. Hecker claims he saw a directed energy weapons system there that is capable of creating earthquakes. He claims it is the largest telescope that is also a phased array transmitter – a sort of air traffic control for UFOs – and is capable of faster than light communications. Hecker claims this weapons/communications system is above and beyond nations…it’s a transnational program that answers to no government.

The stories told by these men are pretty fascinating. I found Hecker’s the most chilling, Digna’s the most believable, Long’s the saddest, and Herrera’s the most bizarre and incomprehensible. Your mileage may vary.

As for the Battle for Disclosure as a whole, I found it to be a poorly constructed, muddled and jumbled mess of a cinematic venture. It is less a document designed to inform or convince than it is a money grab from those already converted to the Church of Greer.  

Battle for Disclosure, or any of Greer’s films for that matter, are not really useful for the majority of ufologists, nor are they a good place to start for newbies, as they are too fantastical and Greer is too aggressively grating and dubious a spokesman to be convincing.

The bottom line is, while I am immensely skeptical to the point of devout disbelief, I do hope that Steven Greer is right and that E.T. is coming to save our home and free us from the villains who currently rule our world, but that doesn’t make his documentaries good or worth watching or very informative. They are, for the most part, pretty much a waste of time….and if you’re a dope like me…a waste of money too.  

©2024

UFO Week - Beyond: UFOs and the Unknown (MGM+) - A Documentary Review

BEYOND: UFOS AND THE UNKNOWN

My Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE. IT. NOW. One of the very best UFO documentaries I’ve seen. Highly informative and insightful. Well worth watching whether you’re a seasoned ufologist or a newbie to the topic.

It is day three of UFO Week here at the home office and things got off to a decidedly bumpy start with two less than stellar documentaries in day one and two.

Thankfully, day three is a gem.

The documentary today is Beyond: UFOs and the Unknown, a four-part documentary miniseries from JJ Abrams’ production company Bad Robot that released it’s first episode on October 27th and its last episode on November 8th.

Bad Robot released their first UFO documentary back in 2021, simply titled UFO, and I found it to be professionally made but underwhelming in a style over substance kind of way.

Beyond: UFOs and the Unknown is not underwhelming in the slightest. Simply said, it is exquisitely made, abundantly researched, and one of the very best documentaries on the subject I have ever seen.

The documentary series, which runs roughly four hours long in total, hits upon a myriad of angles related to the UFO topic. It examines it scientifically, historically, politically and spiritually.

If you’re looking for a murderer’s row of UFO experts Beyond: UFOs and the Unknown is the documentary miniseries for you.

The stellar first episode opens up with a bang with Dr. Gary Nolan, an esteemed medical professor at the prestigious Stanford University, speaking about his scientific and medical work with various intelligence agencies on deathly serious UFO-related topics.

It then dives into the bevy of sightings and experiences of Navy pilots who witnessed and recorded their interaction with various entities in the last twenty years…resulting in the Gimble and Go-Fast videos made famous in the New York Times article of 2017 that brought the UFO topic into the mainstream.

This episode features prominent Naval personnel like former pilot Ryan Graves, Rear Admiral Tim Galudet, as well as Leslie Kean, the journalist who wrote the NY Times piece in 2017, and Christopher Mellon, a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense – and now prominent UFO disclosure advocate.

Also examined are the maze of various UFO programs in the Pentagon over the years and the mind-numbing acronyms that go along with them. As well as the very complex political situation around the subject, which is explained by Senator Kristen Gillibrand, who describes the military’s handling of the UFO situation, “duplicitous and inappropriate.” Wow.

Episode two delves into the history of ufology and features a who’s who of UFO heavy-hitters, like the godfather of ufology, Jacque Vallee, and the guy who knows where all the bodies are buried, PhD Hal Puthoff.

Also explored are the early days of ufology, including Donald Keyhoe’s important work and the curious case of J. Allen Hynek.

One of the most important things discussed in this episode is how it is the Navy pilots who are reporting UFO encounters, with nary a peep from the Air Force. The reasons why this might be are fascinating, not the least of which is that the intelligence agencies take a large chunk of the Air Force budget for black projects, so they are deeply intertwined with the Air Force…and not the Navy.

The other big topic in episode two is Whitley Strieber and alien abduction. Strieber, who was a novelist who was allegedly abducted in the 1980s in upstate New York and wrote a best-selling book about it titled “Communion”, was a catalyst for hundreds of thousands of regular people across the country to come forward with their abduction stories in letters to him after he published his book.

Strieber’s story is an intriguing and compelling one, and he is a terrific spokesperson - articulate, humble and serious.

This leads into episode three and four which feature Jeffrey Kripal, a professor of philosophy and religion at Rice University, who has begun to gather UFO source material from Strieber and Vallee among others in one place so that scientists and academics can do serious study of the subject without ridicule. He has also has begun conferences on esoteric subjects that brings together experts and experiencers to discuss once taboo subjects academically and scientifically.

Episodes three and four delve deeply into the metaphysical and spiritual aspects of UFOs and what they may be beyond physical objects, and what they may mean to science, philosophy and humanity going forward.

Episodes three and four are so rich with deeply serious and thoughtful discussions on elevated esoteric matters that they are worth watching over and over again…as is the rest of the series.

For seasoned followers of the UFO topic, Beyond: UFOs and the Unknown is a gloriously rich documentary that not only informs but seriously challenges.

For newcomers to the subject, this documentary is a great starting place if for no other reason than to give a brief glimpse at the scope and scale of the subject matter, and to do so with a seriousness that it deserves.

The biggest problem with Beyond: UFOs and the Unknown is that it is very difficult to find. The documentary is currently only available on the streaming service MGM+. Not only do I know no one who is a subscriber to MGM+, I myself had never heard of it until I went looking for Beyond: UFOs and the Unknown. That’s not a good thing because unless if you’re a UFO nerd like me, you wouldn’t know this documentary series exists, and therefore won’t ever stumble upon it unless you explicitly are looking for it.

Hopefully it will eventually become available to rent through Amazon or Apple in the future, but for now the best thing to do to see it is to sign up for MGM+…which will give you a free week before it’s month to month subscription at $6.99 kicks in. Watch Beyond: UFOs and the Unknown during your free week…in fact I’d recommend you watch it twice, like I did…and then cancel your subscription before you actually have to pay.

The bottom line is this…whether you’re a ufologist or a newbie, Beyond: UFOs and the Unknown is a must-watch documentary miniseries if you want to have a deeper understanding of the UFO phenomenon and topic. I highly recommend you put in the effort to find and to watch it because considering what is going on in our world at the moment, arming yourself with as much knowledge as you can is a very good idea.

©2024