11th Annual Slip-Me-A-Mickey Awards - 2024 Edition

11th ANNUAL SLIP-ME-A-MICKEY AWARDS

The Slip-Me-A-Mickey™® awards are the final award of the interminably long awards season. The Slip-Me-A-Mickey™®, or as some lovingly call them, The Mockeys™®, are a robust tribute to the absolute worst that film and entertainment has to offer for the year.

Again, the qualifying rules are simple, I just had to have seen the film for it to be eligible. This means that at one point I had an interest in the film and put the effort in to see it, which may explain why I am so angry about it being awful. So, any vitriol I may spew during this awards presentation shouldn't be taken personally by the people mentioned, it is really anger at myself for getting duped into watching.

The prizes are also pretty simple. The winners/losers receive nothing but my temporary scorn. If you are a winner/loser don't fret, because this year’s Slip-Me-A-Mickey™® loser/winner could always be next year’s Mickey™® winner!! Remember…you are only as good as your last film!!

Now…onto the awards!

WORST FILM OF THE YEAR

Blitz –A truly idiotic story, poorly executed…what happened to Steve McQueen? Once upon a time he was one of my very favorite directors and now he’s embarrassing himself, and frankly…me, with this amateur hour, woke-fueled garbage. Yuck. This movie is so atrocious it actually made me root for the Nazis to win World War II. Shame on you Steve McQueen…shame on you.

Trap – M. Night Shyamalan jumped the shark about twenty years ago and now he’s just flailing around in a kiddie pool filled with his own excrement. This is another idiotic story that is egregiously executed. M. Night needs to say goodnight and go away forever.

Megalopolis – Francis Ford Coppola is one of the greatest directors in film history, and Megalopolis is one of the biggest misfires in modern cinematic history…make it make sense. This movie is painfully awful…and so often borders on unwatchable it feels like it should be classified as a snuff film.

Juror #2 – Clint Eastwood is 2,000 years old and is still churning out shoddy and shitty movies like a man half his age. I’m glad Clint is alive and still working…I just wish he’d a make an even halfway decent movie that didn’t make me laugh out loud at how bad it is.

Nightbitch – This will shock you…but this is another astonishingly idiotic movie that is so poorly executed you’d be more entertained watching your neighbor’s dog shit on your lawn than watching this piece of shit. Everything about it is so stupid it makes my colon twinge.

And the loser is…NIGHTBITCH – This movie is so grating, so stupid, so self-serving, delusional and retarded it should force-watched, Clockwork Orange style, by terrorists in CIA prison camps as a form of torture. I also believe every single person associated with this film, or who liked this film, should be imprisoned in said prison camps for life.

MOST OVERRATED FILM OF THE YEAR

Emilia Perez – Jesus Fucking Christ this movie musical with the worst music in the world is unconscionably awful and so are the people who think it’s good, or even watchable. Thirteen Oscar nomination for this turd? Good Lord.

A Complete Unknown – This movie is the poster child for mundanity and is so painfully paint by numbers it feels like it never really existed. It is like a made-up movie they talk about on “Entourage” or something. Bob Dylan seems like he’s an original and interesting guy…but somehow they made a movie about him that is allergic to being interesting and is never once original.

And the loser is…EMILIA PEREZ – At least A Complete Unknown had good music in it…unlike Emilia Perez. Emilia Perez is the most virtue signally, moronic, dramatically flaccid, cinematically inept movie and yet it got thirteen Oscar nominations, which boggles the mind. How anyone could think this movie is even passable, nevermind good, is beyond me.

WORST PERFORMANCE OF THE YEAR

Adam Driver – Megalopolis – This doughy doofus is a turd with feet who was maddeningly miscast as a genius architect/city planner in Megalopolis, which is pretty funny because to look at him you’d think he has Down’s Syndrome or is at the very least Down’s Syndrome adjacent. Can this talentless fuck stick just go away already…please?

Saleka Night – Trap – Nepo baby embarrasses self in daddy’s movie – a story as old as cinema itself. This talentless lady makes Sophia Coppola in Godfather III look like Meryl Streep. Yikes.

Scoot McNairy – Nightbitch – God this guy absolutely sucks in Nightbitch…but on the bright side he also totally sucked in A Complete Unknown…so I guess it’s official…Scoot McNairy sucks. By the way…if this guy’s name was Doug McNairy instead of Scoot…he’d never get hired. Hollywood is fucking retarded.

And the loser is…SALEKA NIGHT – Trap: Saleka Night is so awful in Trap that she manages to make nepo babies look even worse than they did before – which is quite an accomplishment. This young lady needs to go to her luxurious room in her father’s expansive mansion and think about how awful she is at acting!!

SPECIAL ACHIEVEMENT IN CINEMATIC MALPRACTICE

Marielle Heller - Nightbitch director:  Ms. Heller is such an awful hack of a director, and always has been, that she should not only not be allowed to direct movies for the rest of her life, she should also not even be allowed watch movies for the rest of her life. Anyone this bad at their job needs to be punished in the extreme. Ms. Heller’s Nightbitch is supposed to be a comedy horror movie and yet it isn’t comedic or horrifying…but it is laughably bad and horrible…which I guess is as good as Ms. Heller can do.

POS ALL STARS

JLo and Ben Affleck – Ok JLo and Ben Affleck…please just fuck right the fuck off you fucking fucks. I don’t care about your fatal attraction to one another, I don’t care about your love or marriages, and I don’t care about your now dwindling careers. I don’t care about either of you…at all. So if you want to get back to together…that’s fine…JUST DON’T MAKE A PUBLIC SPECTACLE OF YOURSELVES!!

In the most predictable turn of events since gay sexual assaulter Kevin Spacey came dancing out of the closet with jazz hands flying, after the newlyweds for the second time JLo and Ben Affleck did annoyingly narcissistic movie projects together like JLo’s vomit inducing This is Me…Now: A Love Story or her vanity documentary The Greatest Love Story Never Told, and did Ben Affleck’s unfunny and annoying Dunkin Donuts commercials featuring JLO, they woke up one day and realized they are just as awful together as they are individually, and that the other one is just as awful as they are and want to get away from them like we all want to get away from them both.

I now beg both JLo and Ben…please…stay divorced and stay away from each other. Oh…and please stop doing fucking Dunkin Donuts commercials or shitty movies with whatever unfortunate asshole is your next spouse….it won’t end well…trust me…and no one wants to see or hear about it.

Oh…and while I never want to hear about Ben Affleck’s private life that he makes oh-so-public and then complains about people focusing on his private life made public, ever again…JLo…can you please do me a gigantic favor? Can you please disappear off the face of the earth you talentless whore? You are an atrocious “singer”, an abysmal actress and an all-around waste of human flesh…SO PLEASE GO AWAY!!

And also…JLo and Ben…congrats on being Piece of Shit All-Stars!!!

POS HALL OF FAME

Sean “Puff Daddy” Combs aka Diddy – Speaking of JLo…her former “boyfriend” Sean “Puff Daddy” Combs, aka Diddy, is in deep doo doo for being a sexual predator and piece of shit during his nearly thirty-year run as a music impresario, rapper and all-around annoying public figure.

Diddy has always been a poseur who play acted at being tough…and apparently straight. He has always reeked of being on the down-low, and it was pretty obvious to anyone with eyes to see that he was, like so many in the rap game, at least a part-time flaming homosexual and pederast if not pedophile.

Diddy’s persona as a brilliant business man was always as believable as his claim to being a talented music maker…in other words – not at all.

Diddy’s music is an embarrassment, and his business acumen is, like his sexuality and his popularity, a charade. Diddy is an intelligence asset and con-man, much like Jeffrey Epstein, who was put in place by a powerful group to serve a purpose…and he did that very well.

His music (and the music of his company Bad Boy), was meant to sow discord and depravity…and with backing by media and moneyed interests, it succeeded.

But apparently Diddy has run afoul of his paymasters…and now he sists in jail waiting for a cavalcade of charges against him to be adjudicated.

My guess is that Diddy may walk scot-free because he has the goods on a lot of powerful people which will serve as a get out of jail free card…or…he might get shivved in jail and take his secrets to the grave.

The important thing is that Diddy’s guest list from his famous parties, and the videos made at those parties, will only see the light of day in order to serve as a distraction or obfuscation from the Epstein lists and videos. Those Epstein lists and videos will never, ever see the light of day…because the people who have them are the same people who put Diddy in a position of power in the music industry, and are the same nefarious elites who run our government, media, Hollywood, and Wall Street.

Diddy is little more than a distraction from Epstein, and he will serve that purpose going forward and will be discarded or deceased before he ever tells his many tales…and he has many tales to tell.

The bottom line is that Diddy and his ilk, rich and powerful people who prey upon the young and the desperate, are the biggest pieces of shit in the universe…and they all belong in hell…but for now we congratulate Sean Combs – aka Puff Daddy/Diddy to the Piece of Shit Hall of Fame…you’ve certainly earned it you fucking piece of shit!!

And thus ends the fourth annual Slip-Me-A-Mickey™® Awards!!! To the winners/losers…don't take it personally…and God knows I hope I don't see you again next year!! To you dear reader…thanks for tuning in and we'll see you again next year!!

©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

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