Reviews Reviews
2025
The Phoenician Scheme
Lilo & Stitch
Bring Her Back
Final Destination: Bloodlines
Friendship
Fight Or Flight
The Surfer
Until Dawn
Sinners
The Amateur
Warfare
The Ballad Of Wallis Island
The Minecraft Movie
Secret Mall Apartment
Black Bag
Novocaine
Mickey 17
Riff Raff
Love & Pop
Heart Eyes
The Monkey
Companion
Presence
Flight Risk
Nosferatu
A Complete Unknown
The Phoenician Scheme
 I’m one of those ordinary kinds of assholes who says that all Wes Anderson movies are kind of like one another, even though I haven’t seen all of them—I’ve seen most of them, though, let’s be real, yet I still get the three mixed up, Rushmore, Darjeeling, Tenenbaums… which one has Jason S and he’s in love with his teacher? I like that one…! I don’t personally know anyone that gets enthusiastic over a new one of his movies, which I guess puts me in a post-hipsta hipsta kind of circle… The Phoenician Scheme is just about exactly what you think it is. It’s dismissive to go about it in a if-you’ve-seen-one-you’ve-seen-them-all kind of way. Like I saw Asteroid City two years ago in an empty theater on the 4th of July at this same theater, and frankly I slept through half of it, and didn’t like it. This time around, I didn’t sleep, had a few laughs, and left thinking, “Hey that was alright…” it may be due to being accompanied by my girlfriend, which I didn’t have when I saw Asteroid City. This is a cute Wes Anderson-ass movie; make of that what you will. It’d be like reviewing one of the last, like, fifteen Guided By Voices albums. Since like 2015 you know what you’re gonna be getting; if you aren’t into it then I don’t know what it’s gonna take to twist your arm about it, but if you’ve been buying every record since even like Mirrored Aztec I don’t see why you wouldn’t check it out (I haven’t listened to one since around the Mirrored Aztec, btw… huge fan but at this point in time if I’m listening to GBV it’s strictly 1991-1996… with a little of the underrated TVT stuff). Sure, there are of course things in a Wes Anderson flick that are going to annoy me, things that seem to delight other more enthusiastic theater-goers… Like for instance scenes of Tom Hanks and B. Cranston shooting basketballs, which made some of the audience giggle like little dickheads. Kind of reminds me of the early 2010’s when Bill Murray would make a cameo in something just to incite laughs with a specific kind of person. Oh yeah, he pops up in here for a minute too, again inciting laughter with said little dickheads. I often get lost in the actual narrative with these newer movies too because the speedy animated dialogue that has unfortunately become his signature… Same with Asteroid City, causing me to sleep. Not to mention the actual story seems driven by so little—or at least, it’s devoid of any real tension that you forget that at some point there could be something tense happening, or something that looks like a climax of sorts—it doesn’t really happen in this. But this all feels like a lot of complaining about something that you already know if you would see or not… And also, I somewhat liked the film, which I haven’t been clear about, something I maybe got from Wes Anderson. It looks the way you know it will look—it’s beautiful in that way, but you’ve seen it before… The pacing, you’re familiar with… I like the main ensemble—I’m generally biased towards favoring Del Toro, who has a lot of funny lines in here, as does Cera, who I expected to try too hard to be a W. Anderson character, but he is fun… I laughed more than expected, but with these films, you laugh more at isolated lines than an actual scene (I hated the basketball scene, again.). I don’t know. I can’t really hate on dude for fulfilling what is obviously his own personal creative vision, it’s just not always my shit... But it’s a cute movie, the Phoenician Scheme. It’s pretty short too, at like 100 minutes, you’re rocking through it quick before dinner time. We saw it at a 4:50 showtime and went to New Spicy Village after and killed a huge bowl of chicken. I recommend it if you like Anderson… obviously? It would be nice to see him try a modern kind of thing again… Love Bottle Rocket.

6-5
Lilo & Stitch
 I wanted to see this opening week but after I saw some initial criticism about some changes made I thought I wouldn’t see it. Seemed like another “casualty of wokeness,” something that I don’t agree or disagree with for the most part. At this point I’m pretty bored of the discussion at all. I also love the original Lilo & Stitch; I certainly owned the classic Disney plastic shell VHS at some point, and I’ve rewatched it recently enough to say I still think it’s one of the better modern-ish Disney movies. Plus, Tiff was open to seeing it, so hell, why not? We went to a 7:30 showtime, and took a little walk for ice cream beforehand. A great start-to-the-summer evening.

In terms of the changes made to the movie, I wouldn’t consider it enough of a problem to not like it, certainly if you’re a fan of the original. I somehow hadn’t seen any trailers for this leading up to seeing this, but it had been clear to me that it’d be a live-action-with-CGI version. I didn’t realize it’d be a remake; I was thinking maybe it’d be some kind of reboot or sequel of sorts? But a remake makes sense. Kind of like the 101 Dalmatians one that came out when I was a kid. But yes, it’s a remake by definition. BUT IS IT GOOD, YOU ASK? Yeah, I liked it. I already love the setting of the original film. It’s adapted well here, with a bit more emphasis on the tourist-y nature of Hawaii. Are the characters properly done IRL here? Yeah, I’d say so. Lilo and her older sister Nani are captured well in Disney fashion. The girl who plays Lilo decently portrays a problem child well, although the dubbing for a lot of her lines seem to be edited horribly, an issue on behalf of the studio. Nani’s character does a very specific kind of overacting, a very Disney-esque kind of acting that involves a lot of exaggerated face movements—but that’s kind of how characters move in animated Disney flicks, so I think it provides for a pretty decent translation of the material. Also in regards to translation, Stitch looks pretty damn good here in terms of CGI. It matches charm of the original 2D version of the little blue dog thingie nicely. I think the folks behind this one were dead set on making this as close to the original as possible—there are some minor updates, but like, there aren’t any annoying social media jokes or anything like that—like there are phones and shit but there isn’t much reminding us that, “hey this is an updated version of the 25-year-old film!”. This is a good thing, if you ask me.

In terms of the changes made that have pissed people off, they didn’t piss me off at all. I don’t think I would have even noticed them if they weren’t mentioned. Like I said, it’s been several years since I’ve watched the OG, but I can’t imagine remembering what is a pretty minor detail overall—like, it doesn’t really change the turn of events much.

It’s a sweet movie, while not getting too caught up in the sentimental. There’s plenty of silly comic relief with the alien guys played by Zach Galifinakis and the other guy, but even if you were to take away all of that stuff, you’d have a nice little film about family and all that. I found it to be a nice update of the original. It’s nice to leave a theater and both you and the person you saw are like, “That was nice.” I left Regal in a good mood, so it’s fair to say I enjoyed it. People on the internet get too uppity about changes made to properties (on both sides of the "woke" and "unwoke" scale), especially big ones like this. Whatever. I still think next they should to a remake of Oliver & Company.

6-2
Bring Her Back
 I forget sometimes just how many horror movies I end up having to see in Regal each year. It’s at least half of all that I see. For the most part I’m a fan of the genre, and even the bad stuff can be fun at the very least, but most of the time it seems to be forgettable. I completely forgot that I saw Until Dawn and Heart Eyes within the last several months until I looked through my list just now. It’s nice when I get to watch one that’s both pretty damn good, pretty damn fun, and pretty damn fucked.

Bring Her Back is a new Australian horror movie. The fact that it’s both Australian and Good reminded me the 2023 film Talk To Me, which surprised me how good it was… It turns out that this film is made by the same two guys that made that one. OK, makes sense. I wish I had known that going in, but I also had seen no kind of trailer or anything for this prior. It was 3 in the afternoon, and I wanted to see something that wasn’t the new Lilo & Stitch (next week) and the new Mission Impossible (possibly never, although maybe), and this was all that was playing.

It could have used some Longlegs-esque promotion, though… This one is pretty fucking cool. And pretty fucking fucked!

Bring Her Back follows 17-year-old Andy and his blind sister (by marriage) Piper, both orphaned by the recent death of their father (his biological). They are taken into foster care by this crazy old coot Laura—clearly she isn’t all right, and it’s apparent from the moment we meet her—and slowly we come to realize she’s into some crazy ritualistic stuff going on in her secluded home. I can’t summarize it much more than that without giving away too much. It feels much like an early 80’s horror of some kind to me, something cult/ritualistic with a mix of Mommy Dearest, and a little reminiscent of Friday The 13th Part 1 (Could be spoiling something here… I was reminded a bit of Pamela Voorhees, down to a slew of cable knit sweaters). The majority takes place in this giant house/compound-like home, where as the mysteries of this crazy lady and her son are revealed, we see that Laura get her Mommy Dearest on. Again, I don’t want to spoil it too much, but there is a lot of shocking child abuse at the hands of Laura, not to mention some other random humiliation rituals, like making it look like Andy wets the bet (something which I don’t think furthered a narrative, but it certainly helped to frame Laura as a hateable… and for the most part our hero Andy is very likeable). There is a lot of kids getting their shit rocked, not something I’ve seen to this degree since I guess their last film… but it’s amped up here, for sure. It’s pretty brutal.

The three mains are good. Piper, the [basically] blind and too-trusting younger sister, Andy the protective older brother with some built-in previous trauma (pretty much a staple in any horror at this point—done well here), and Laura, who is the star, and you really wanna see her get her ass handed to her, and by the time any kind of comeuppance is served, you feel sad for her. Well, I guess I did. It’s a depressing movie with a lot of emotional curveballs, and when I thought I’d feel some kind of vindication, the credits rolled, and I felt kind of choked up. The Philippou brothers have a good thing going between this and their last i one. I don’t think I’d want to see this again just because, yeah it’s brutal the shit some of the shit we are forced to see. It spares us pretty much all comedic relief; the tone is much darker than Talk To Me. Like, I was in a pretty unruly and loud audience during this afternoon movie, but by the time shit started hitting the fan at the 45-minute mark, the audience was pretty silent throughout.

Worth a couple hours out of your day. I could see this one getting a similar kind of word-of-mouth like traction similar to the last Philippou flick. Contender for best horror movie this year, and definitely the best horror movie that prominently features a swimming pool, beating out the 2023 Night Swim.

5-29
Final Destination: Bloodlines
 The original Final Destination in context with the era in which is was released is a pretty fresh horror film. Essentially a non-slasher slasher flick, it used a lot of tropes and predictabilities, but the entire “Death is the killer” was interesting enough for me, a kid who would stay up late to watch an airing of “Madmen” or “Pumpkinhead 2” on AMC. I rewatched the first Final Dee a few nights before seeing the new one; Tiff wanted to watch one of them before we saw the new one at Regal, and it has also had been quite a few years since I’d seen it (I’ve seen 1, 2, 3 a handful of times, never seen 4, 5… To get to your question, you don’t necessarily need to see any of them to understand what happens, although you’ll understand little Easter eggs like “Clear Rivers” and why a log truck driving by is it’s own cameo). The new one uses the same formula as the first three, but instead of a group of friends, we follow a pair of siblings, their parents, cousins, uncles: hence the “Bloodlines” in the title. The family dynamic and a lot of the dialogue between them reminded me of a Blumhouse movie: I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if somebody at Blumhouse wrote this screenplay without ever having seen a Final movie, and then they just worked some Final plot points into it. We are given this cycle that didn’t exist in the former films that death is targeting specifically this family, starting with grandma and then working his way down in order of birth: The crazy grandma has been avoiding her own death for decades, and we get a pretty great opening premonition scene, a staple in any of these movies, that takes place in a Space-Needle-like skyline restaurant that takes place in the sixties. It’s cool to get a kind of origin story for one of these movies, even if it, no matter how much you try to explain it throughout the film, doesn’t make that much sense.

Grandma dies, uncle, cousin, so on. It’s explained early, so if you do have experience with how these movies work, you know who’s next, and it eliminates a lot of the mystery of who’s next like in the first one, but it introduces a dread of just when it will happen (and death, who liked to spread them out in the older flicks, is a lot more hasty here, and a death may happen like, one after the other), and there are some twists and loopholes within that order that are cute, at least. One of the cousins has tattoos and a septum piercing and people on the internet seem to like him, but to me he just looks like a guy I met at a bar in Bushwick in 2017. Or really any guy I met in Bushwick in 2017. There’s a lot of schtick within the dialogue, and the characters all dispense a lot of comedic relief, which is a pretty big change from the original, which had some humor, but it was pretty melodramatic which is certainly of it’s time, but I think it works within the film a lot better. But I also may be tired from every horror film having to stop tension for a stupid one-liner. It is funny how quickly the characters here seem to stop caring that they just saw their sibling get killed in a trash compactor, though. The younger bro just saw his entire family dissipate into piles of CGI blood, and then days later he still gets suited up for his prom? I think it could have waited.

CGI blood is a character of it’s own here, and there are a lot of squishy deaths. Most of it is much too cartoony to be anything truly visceral. A lot of the setups and foreshadowing is more scary than the actual deaths, but they’re still pretty fun and creative… But they don’t need to be all video-game-squishy to be good. The deaths in the first few films are memorable because they come out of nowhere, and they really go stick with you for awhile, just in the way a pretty irrational true-to-life fear can be. Like crashing on a plane… Roller coasters… Just get in a car with a few people and get on the interstate, and I’m sure if you’re driving behind a truck of logs, somebody’s gonna mention Final Destination.

I couldn’t stop comparing it to the Jackass films: I was in love with the show from the pilot, and the first two films I’ve watched countless times. The later ones follow the same structure, but they put so much effort into making it about the stunts being painful or elaborate, and a lot of the charm and personality is lost. Any cleverness used in Bloodlines was to explain the elaborate plot which elaborates on pretty little.

We get Tony Todd (RIP) to return as he always does in these films, with a little bit of a nonsensical backstory that wasn’t needed… it ends up being a little bit of a meta goodbye to the audience, since he died and all. I feel like adding to his story made things more confusing, and although I think Todd had a great presence in these kinds of characters, I always thought his role in these films weakened the film itself, specially the mystery of it… Of course we never have an actual, tangible killer in these films, and he always seemed to be a placeholder for that in a way, at least how he’s presented in the first few; in this one, our main cast is always talking about death in a way that sounds like they’re actually running from a killer, and for this it sheds any mystery that we saw in the first one. I guess there’s been six of these now, and most people are paying for the creative kills, and they’re at least fun.

And you know, I did enjoy it. Sure, the family stuff feels tacked on to try giving it that Blumhouse feel, but I get what it’s doing, and I think for most people who would want to see this, it will work for them. It’s a fairly-to-really stupid movie within the framing of movies, but it never tries to be anything but that. For your week, it’s kind of between this and the new The Weeknd movie… Last week’s Fight or Flight is already out of Regal, so those are your picks.

5-18
Friendship
 Regal has been tricking the hell out of me lately. First with the advertising of the game show biopic “The Luckiest Man In America,” a movie I positively wanted to see in theaters (and also a movie that Regal advertised both via trailers and posters in their own cinema). Months went by, and I never saw any showtimes posted for it. Several days ago, I looked it up, and it released a month and a half ago? Fucking bullshit… This happens pretty often though. Distributors will send a film out to be played across the country, and include trailers that they want to play before the movie—even if the theater has no intention of actually airing the movie upon release. I ended up having to rent “Luckiest Man” via streaming, obviously the new and less fun way to watch a movie… I mean it was nice getting to eat dinner with Tiff and watch it in the house, but as far as mainstream cinema goes, I’m a bit of a purist… I love seeing movies in theaters, obviously. I mean obviously (the movie was good, by the way… Would have loved to review it but since I didn’t see it on the big screen, it will have to stay in my Letterboxed (which I do not use))!!!

When I first saw trailers for Friendship a few months ago, I was certain that I would have to see it at Regal. Months went by, however, and it started airing in the more indie-style theaters in the city. Well what the hell! What was the purpose of all of that advertising… I was sure I wouldn’t be seeing it at Regal, but then suddenly they had added all of these showtimes for it, showtimes which were not available even 24 hours earlier—if I’m bored I’m probably opening the Regal app just to look at movie posters, so I’m pretty up-to-date on it. This was like 3 in the afternoon I noticed it. There was a showtime for 4 so I figured whatthehell! I’m gonna go catch an afternoon showing of something I legitimately want to see.

Friendship is a rare instance of a straight comedy film released in 2025. It stars the very popular Tim Robinson, who blew up virtually overnight with his Mr. Show-like sketch comedy show, “I Think You Should Leave,” I show I liked a lot, but by the most recent season, I got a little tired from his blend of awkward/cringe/coworker humor mixed with neck-sticking-out yelling… Most of the time I enjoy the coworker humor, and I think, like Kyle Mooney, he has a very keen sense for the way pretty regular-to-sad people act on a normal day (Kyle Mooney, like Tim, was given a similar chance last year with his movie Y2K, which had some of the good stuff that you like about him, but with so much bad stuff that it isn’t very enjoyable), but some of the yelling is…

Friendship has both Tim Robinson and Paul Rudd on main; the film, especially with the inclusion of Rudd, is very much like the shockingly-not-Apatow-directed “I Love You Man,” but with a darker tone that is a constant in most mainstream stuff now, yes, even comedies. This one centers more around a real-life parasocial relationship, with Tim’s character awkwardly blowing his chances in being accepted into Rudd’s group of friends, and spending the rest of the movie trying to impress him while copying a bunch of his quirks and lines. Rudd’s role is more like Siegel’s from I Love You Man, a guy who seems and acts “cool” and nonchalant, but realistically he’s kind of lame duck, and a bit of a loser. I wouldn’t want to hang out with Tim or Paul’s character in this. But I would love to hang out in Siegel’s man cave.

I Love You Man is one of my favorite movies of that genre, in a time period where comedies could be pretty low stakes; maybe it’s about a virgin adult, or a guy who needs a best man for his wedding. In Friendship, it’s about a guy with a strange narcissistic guy who may want to kill somebody, something very much not in ILYM. In that film, you actually like Paul Rudd, a former awkward-humor champion, who ends up at worst being clumsy with words, but entirely well-meaning. His issue was his dependency on his relationship with women; he simply had no male friends from his first relationship on. With Robinson, he is open to have any friends, but he’s just a pure psycho; you’re not sure if he’s literally going to shoot somebody by the end of the thing (using the Chekov’s Gun principle in a very literal manner throughout).

And if you’ve seen any Robinson stuff, then you’re going to find a lot of the same kind of stuff here. Most of his characters seem to be based on a guy who had really old parents or something… Like he’s always twenty years behind on things, and seems to spend much of his time fumbling through trying to look cool in front of people who generally are on the same level of lame as him. You could go back to the pilot of his show when he’s literally hiding a hot dog in his shirt sleeve at an office meeting; this film pretty much an extended I Think You Should Leave sketch.

A lot of the film depends on your interest level in Tim Robinson and his crew’s style of humor. These kinds of movies, like I Love You Man, are catered for the star to show what you probably already enjoy about them. I probably wouldn’t run to watch the new season of his show, but getting the chance to see how it would translate into a film, yes. Especially in a sea of, well, mostly films that are not comedy films, it’s nice to have one per season. And it’s cool to see random ITYSL cast members like Whitmer Thomas and Eric Rahill, who I think is funny AF. Patti Harrison, one of my favorite people in the show, is absent, though, but had a pretty big role in the movie I was talking about in the first paragraph, so that was cool.

But if you like Tim Robinson you’ll definitely get at least a few kicks out of this. The trailer actually does a pretty good job of advertising what you’ll be getting in this, and if you find it somewhat funny, you’ll probably feel similarly towards the full thing. The crowd I was in definitely liked it. One guy in the theater couldn’t help but to giggle at every single line delivered in the thing. Ivy Wolk popped up, and she simply says hello to Tim Robinson, and this guy had a hell of a chuckle at even that. He didn’t ruin the movie, but he definitely made me reconsider laughing as a thing I do.

5-16
Fight Or Flight
 Fight or Flight isn’t the first airline action thriller I’ve seen this year, and it’s probably not even the best. Josh Hartnett stars as a disgraced FBI/CIA something (I forget) tasked with finding a secret hacker person on a flight to recover something or rather in exchange for his freedom, I think. The plot is loose, and any of the government/hacker exposition we get feels straight out of an M. Night movie—like I swear we hear things like “hacking” and “mainframe” a lot—something about the childish dialogue and writing feels like something out of one of his films (not to mention Hartnett, who starred in last year’s Trap, a terrible film; yet ultimately not forgettable… I can’t say I disliked it), but the R-rated violence and language transports it out of Shyamalan territory. There is so much cussing in here. That and most of the humor—most of which is cussing—feels geared towards people who own those books like “The Subtle Art Of Not Giving A F*%k. The audience laughed a lot, actually, though. I laughed some too, just not that much, and several times it was as in response to the wire-thin plot and goofy exposition (the hacker that Hartnett’s character is sent to capture, “The Ghost,” is doing all this hackerish terroristic stuff, and then it’s all forgiven when she (IT’S A GIRL BTW) explains that it’s to end slave labor—with a small rant about how we are all glued to our phones. On the plane are dozens of bounty hunter/murder types, out to kill The Ghost, and by proxy, Hartnett, whose job is to bring her to safety. Like I said, it feels very Shayamalanesque. The violence is surprisingly a pretty hard R, though it’s portrayed very cartoonishly, and mixed with the lack of any kind of tension it doesn’t do that much besides exist as a music video kind of thing—I feel like directors have been trying to chase that high from Kill Bill Vol 1 with the Crazy 88 scene, like even 20 years later, and they think by adding an ironic song to graphic violence, it adds some kind of style; it doesn’t work here, because it’s just ABD, straight up. The music-video-like action scenes remind me of something like Kickass, which felt fresh when it came out. I don’t know... If this came out in like 2010 with things like Drive Angry or Machete, and I was like, 18, I would have had more fun with it... not to to say that I didn’t enjoy my theater-going experience here, but it really is dumb as shit, and with a movie like this you know that that's the central thesis, but it'd be nice to have something within the film to take seriously.. Flight Risk, somehow, was a more enjoyable airline thriller for me, maybe because it felt like Gibson was actually trying to make a good movie, believe it or not, rather than saying to the audience, "Eh, it's stuid, but that's the charm". Fight Or Flight spends too much time trying to set up clumsy explanations for why things are the way they are, which, if it was so reliant on the stupidity as the device, why does any of the insider stuff matter? Not to mention this kind brand of humor is just so millenial… I guess that's who's going to see this (although I hadn't seen any kind of promotion for this up until seeing it, not even a trailer... Can't stress enough how annoying it is to get trailers at Regal for things that they won't even be actually showing at Regal!!!) It’s a pretty crappy movie, but for something fun to watch on a Regal Tuesday with Tiff it was a good time, although I would have been much grumpier to have seen this alone on a Saturday afternoon or something.

5-13
The Surfer
 One of these newer style Nic Cage arthouse-ish style movies, think Mandy, Pig, Longlegs, not all of them are so memorable (Mandy was great, don’t remember a thing about Pig, Longlegs falls flat by act 3) but they all have a certain kind of thrilling contemporary-ness and you can’t help but to think he has gotten more choosy about what he stars in, this being a guy who at one point was the butt of a lot of jokes due to his inability to do so fifteen, twenty years ago. The Surfer puts Cage in the middle of a parking lot at a small beach community in Australia, a beach in which he grew up as a kid. He’s back here now forty years later to buy his childhood home for him and his son, but there’s a local group of surfer OG’s who resist this notion. He spends much of the movie antagonizing the locals, a culty-er version of the Point Break bros, who are aggressive to the point of anti-bullying after-school special type characters sometimes. They give him so many opportunities to leave, but he chooses to stay sleeping in his Lexus in the parking lot for a week, and I assume it’s intentional but it gets to the point where you stop sympathizing with Cage’s character altogether. There’s lots of cool footage of snakes and kangaroos and shit and thematically it blends with the surfer gang’s ethos about their own human nature and man’s need to blow off steam in some we-are-animals-at-the-end-of-the-day kind of shit. Our hero meets other locals in the 30-car parking lot who all pretty much berate him, minus an actual homeless gentleman probably 15 or 20 years his senior, a man very similar in looks to Cage (Cage’s character seems to lose his sanity scene by scene, and is also literally losing his phone, his watch, his car). He shows up throughout the movie on and off early on, leading you to believe that maybe Cage is the old homeless jerk. There’s a lot of Taxi Driverisms like this, where you’re taken on a bit of a roller coaster, and I was invested in what would happen; every time one of these mental red herrings would happen, I’d think it would start to go sour, and I mean some of the twists you can see coming, but it’s still a pretty fun hellride. The cinematography is great, and you spend pretty much the entirety of the film in this dry parking lot, watching Cage’s character shrivel up and drive himself completely mad under the sun, and you can feel yourself being thirsty as hell watching him refuse help from people (not me, I had a Pepsi with my popcorn, which, it was my birthday, and Regal offers a free popcorn and large soda for birthday-celebrating Regal Unlimited members). Cage delivers in the Cage-like fashion that you know what to expect, and you can intuit to some degree that the writers of the screenplay probably had him in mind, specifically this montage later on in the film filmed with a fisheye lens where he has attained full homeless crazyman status, bothering people in the parking lot and eating eggs straight from the nest, drinking from puddles in the parking lot. It’s a Cage role, but it makes perfect sense. Julian McMahon as the main surfer antagonist is great here too, and really the only one of the dickheads who isn’t antagonistic so a silly degree. There’s a point near the end where you start to like the gang, but then there are a few things added to their origin where you have to be like, “Ok, they are bad guys.” I like the Swayze crew in Point Break more. It feels a little long for an hour-40, especially near the end, but once the credits rolled I felt like it was pretty neatly wrapped up. I have never surfed in my life, but I’m a huge sucker for any beach-central setting, so there may be a bias, but this movie just looks incredible. I happened to be wearing one of my favorite fragrances, At The Beach, from CB I Hate Perfume, which added to the atmosphere of the whole thing. It’s a beautifully-shot hellscape, with a bunch of twists and turns that keep you invested. It’s certainly worth a watch in theaters for the visuals and atmosphere alone, I just fucking love them! I saw it at Regal Delancey, again it was my birthday. It was a 1 PM showtime, so I got there at 1:10 for the trailers. I downsized my free large popcorn and soda to smalls because I didn’t need all that. I also had mint cookie dough bites, a snack Tiff and I had been talking about getting and I finally decided to get them. They were incredible.

5-3
Until Dawn
 Fun enough slasher-style movie based on the survivor horror game of the same title (never played, but I am aware that the game is based on the slasher film genre—so in a way this is a movie based on a game based on a movie, kind of like Street Fighter: The Movie: The Game but in reverse). Starts with ten to fifteen minutes of useless exposition between our main cast, like hilariously expositioned exposition... Paraphrasing but it isn't far off from something like, "Well I'm a psychology major and she used to date him until his mom died and then her sister went missing, and since then..." Anyways, they wind up in a house in the woods, being stalked by a crazy kind of psycho (or psychos…???). Transitions into more like Happy Death Day with an Evil Dead backdrop. I kept wanting to compare it to Cabin in the Woods, or maybe I was hoping it would be as surprising of a concept as that was when I saw that in theaters, but it never gets quite that clever with it. Instead, we get a few guys and gals getting killed in a Groundhog Day kind of fashion (I already mentioned Happy Death Day once). As most contemporary horror films, it deals with unresolved trauma; in this case, our main girl is accompanied with her four friends to go out and find her sister, who has been missing for a year. One of the friends is a guy who has recently started dating one of the friends, which is funny to me. Like he just started dating this girl and she asked him a few months into their thing if he would be interested in searching for her friend’s long-lost sister? Silly shit. He also ends up being the funniest in the film, and much of the time the most logical. Our main girl also suffers from depression, past several suicide attempts, which is only mentioned when it’s needed, and most of the time time it isn’t really part of the plot, again reminded me somewhat of the Evil Dead remake but not done quite as well. Well anyways, the group is subject to being murdered for days on end, in both creative and uncreative ways, both onscreen and off, in a cosmic loop of sorts. The violence is fortunately quite good, and there’s a couple scenes which make a lot of the silly stuff worth it, one in particular involving contaminated water which is definitely memorable, and would have been more fun to see with a group of people, in a crowded theater at night (I saw this at an 11 AM showing with five or six people spread throughout auditorium 3, one of the larger theaters in the cinema. Funny vibe for a movie like this). The gore we get in the second half mixed with the atmosphere are very reminiscent to a survivor horror game, so that’s good, but the little issues with the plot are also reminiscent of a story in a game as well, which is not exactly a compliment. The cast is as stock as expected, with a few funny things thrown in thanks to the beefcake-y jock boyfriend who came for no reason. The last 20-minutes or so are good enough to warrant me recommending this movie, but I think it’d be a lot more fun of a thing to see at night with some friends. And also I know nothing about the game, so I may be missing a lot of what I’m supposed to be recognizing. For instance, there’s a scene where a couple of our heroes try to escape the haunted area, and there’s this 100-foot lumbering monster keeping them from leaving. And then we never see this again! What the fuck? There was some other stuff like this, making me think I missed something central to the story, stuff with witches, I don’t know… I had trouble comprehending every note, but fortunately it was fun enough to not care that much. It was good enough for a non-Blum horror flick. I liked it enough!!!

4-26
Sinners
 I read an article about the movie industry’s qualms with audiences still not going to the movies to see their movies, even with their more recent attempts to put out more stuff with original scripts, ideas, basically anything that isn’t a reboot or a Marvel thing… Yes, this has been a general problem on behalf of audiences for a long time now, to the point where I’ve heard it so much that I’m now like, well maybe it’d be a fun project in itself to see all the Marvel universe movies… Anyways they bring up specifically two movies that released this month, Drop and The Amateur, both original scripts (their words, btw. The Amateur is a remake of a 1981 film which is based on a novel??? So what the fuck are we talking about here?). They complain that these two movies which were promoted quite heavily still didn't make enough $ to exit the "flop" category. Tale as old as time in 2025. Not too much to say about it, really. The Amateur wasn’t good or fun enough to warrant any kind of word-of-mouth type of movement, and I didn’t see Drop, but Blumhouse is getting more like Marvel in terms of general audience exhaustion (saying this, though, I like pretty much all Blumhouse stuff, even when it’s something like Night Swim. They hit the right kind of crappy notes of a PG-13 horror flick for me).

Anyways... I saw Sinners on a Monday night, of all nights, to a mostly packed theater, something I normally only witness on Tuesdays or Fridays. I don’t have too much to say about Sinners, really. Takes place in a juke joint in the 1930’s, directed by Ryan Coogler of Black Panther fame. The cast is great and the first hour (it’s 2:17 I believe) takes it’s time establishing everything (this film has been compared to From Dusk Til Dawn a lot, if that helps), and a lot of the stuff we get in the first part is pretty great. The second half is too, and that's where most of the FDTD comparisons come in; although I think I like the second half of FDTD more, and here, I like the first half more. It's a fun watch, and it doesn't really feel like 2 hours and 17 minutes. I didn't write much about this, though. Much of the time I am seeing these films in a relatively empty theater, and I often take notes whilst. Here I was unable to, due to the full occupancy. Sinners is actually doing well at the box office, fwiw. Probably not in my top favorite films of the year, but it was an entertaining as hell, and there's a great chemisty between the cast (Michael B. Jordan is great here, playing as two brothers, but newcomer Miles Canton is the star here for me, cast wise). I had some small-time qualms with some small-time problems, according to the small amount of notes I took; for one, the bad vampire guys are trying to enter this juke joint, yet... the main one can fly??? And he only seems to use this skill for aesthetic reasons in the film... But it's a fun film, certainly worth seeing in theaters. I am writing this five days after seeing it, so I have a little bit of a spotty memory regarding the film. FYI. But you should certainly see it over The Amateur, and probably Drop, which I have yet to see.

4-21
The Amateur
 Unimportant revenge/action/thriller about some little nerdy spy dude trying to get vengeance for the murder of his wife, think something like Taken, but instead of Liam Neeson kicking a hundred asses to save his daughter immediately, we get the guy who played Freddie Mercury (Rami Malek) acting neurotic and not doing much of anything heroic. Also with Taken, Liam Neeson’s character is trying to save somebody (his daughter), and here our main guy is just sad his nice wife was killed so he’s going after some bad guys, more like a Kill Bill vengeance thing, but again he’s just this little bitch ass dude who goes between looking at a computer screen and crying for the first half. Rami, who probably is a good actor, is not seeking vengeance much of the time, rather just looking at zoomed in photos of surveillance footage trying to find out who the killer of his wife is. That is a lot of this movie, trying to impress us with this guy’s skills in finding these CIA double-crossers by looking at a bunch of computer screens. I feel dumb even bringing Kill Bill up, because in no way are they alike, but I couldn’t help myself from trying to remember if this was a thing in those movies, like were there 45 minutes of footage of Uma T trying to find her killers? I feel like a lot of it was skipped, trusting that us, the audience, can trust her to be able to do that already. Man, it slows the movie down so much. This is a long 2-hour movie. Most of the stuff I’ve seen this year is closer to 90, which this could have been cut down to easily. Any kind of vengeance enacted here is so light. I think there are two scenes of any kind of violence taken on the bad guys, and one of them is our hero trapping a lady in an allergy chamber of sorts before she accidentally gets hit by a bus??? Even the stuff that should be funny isn’t really because you’ll already be bored as hell. And none of this stuff even happens until well past an hour; and the first hour is our hero learning how to try to be bad ass with the help of useless Lawrence Fishburne, and evading the higher up CIA guys who all end up just going, “Darn it, he got us again! He’s good.” The main CIA bad guy, played by Holt McCallany, is a couple times unintentionally funny though; when our hero is unfolding his plan to enact vengeance on his wife, Holt says to him, verbatim, “You’ll go to jail, idiot.” The action is PG-13 to a fault, as always with these things (although Taken was PG-13, and was able to perform a lot more given the same limitations), but here it’s soft as can be. The one potentially cool scene was in the trailer, like the entire scene, essentially, so that isn’t much, and the climax is hilariously pitiful; like, face to face with his wife’s killer, and the bad guy literally hands Rami a gun to shoot him point blank; Rami sets the gun down, and is like, “I just wanted to give you the same feeling that you gave my wife when you killed her.” Bitchass dude! We also get a character very early on in the film who disappears through almost the entire film; obviously we are going to get backstabbed by him at some point, and then that happen, and he pretty much just disappears again, I think??? He appears, pretty much says, "Yeah, I'm one of the bad guys..." And then he's gone???

I don’t have much good to say about this one. In terms of things like it I’ve seen this year, it is far worse than something like Novocaine, it’s way more boring than Flight Risk, and it’s significantly worse of a spy movie than Black Bag, and that one barely even had spy stuff in it. I saw this at a 3:50 PM showtime (So 4:15) and the 20% filled theater wasn’t really enjoying it either. Any time he was grieving his wife, they were all laughing! So that’s not good…

4-16
Warfare
 Alex Garland has had a hell of a year, hmmm… His 2024 film from last year, Civil War, was polarizing for a lot of people I knew. Or really, I liked it, and a lot of people I know did not like it. One thing that I really appreciated in it was the sound design, which is even more apparent here, in Warfare, his 2025 Iraq war movie, co-directed by Ray Mendoza—the film is based on his own experiences and memories of his time as a Navy SEAL in the war. Seriously, this movie sounds fucking incredible… It’s no feel-good flick, far from it, more resembling something like American Sniper than anything else (minus any character exposition—we get a great 2-minute thing at the beginning introducing our main characters before getting thrown into battle. This is done so well. You get what Garland is going far before the title card comes up, and I think that’s great.) Taking place over the course of one battle in 2006, we follow a platoon of guys we barely know by name, and as casualties start occurring, you find yourself having trouble making a distinction between who died, who is injured, who is carrying who to safety—intentionally done by the directors, surely… the senselessness of the war etc—It’s already one of those movies getting labeled propaganda, accused of propping up a pointless war, but there’s no kind of glamorization going on here. We see Americans get legs blown up, shot at, shaken probably permanently from IED explosions—and we see a lot of firepower used against the “Bad Guys”—yet we never see any kind of injuries/deaths from them. There is really little in the field of empowering for us, the US audience. But I’m also one of those guys who didn’t think American Sniper was really glamorizing anything either; rather, showcasing real people, who sacrificed real lives, for a really real battle over, something ultimately pointless, losing lives for no reason in the process. Yeah, I’ll say it… I’m not one for war… Anyways…

Again, the sound is glorious. The first fifteen minutes of the film felt nearly silent with the exception of minor dialogue between walkie talkies and “Copy”s and the like (The intro, which I mentioned, is 2 minutes of the platoon watching the music video for Eric Prydz' "Call On Me," first showing the video and then zooming out to the guys dancing to it. This ends up being an unforgettable moment on it's own, one of the best parts of the whole film; no useless exposition, no "You have a lady back home"isms... It isn't needed here. It's basically perfect.). After that first IED goes off, though—the loudest moment in the movie, and I should warn any sensitive-ear types, the loudest thing I’ve witnessed in a movie in a long time, the action is relentless. Gunfire and explosions in the background, arguing and more walkie-talking, screams of agony from the severely wounded… Up until the last scene, it doesn’t do much of any kind of letting up. Edge of your seat kind of stuff that absolutely needs to be seen in theaters, if you have any kind of interest in seeing this. I’ve heard this thing is incredible in IMAX. I was in the back row in a large theater and I’m saying this. THE SOUND DESIGN IS INCREDIBLE. It was apparent in Civil War as well. The gunfire in both are just... Damn, if you like Michael Mann, get your ass in a seat for this one.

One minor issue I had was the very end, seeing photos and video of the real-life platoon, something that of course has to be added into any American war flick. I felt that the final scene before this was a perfect way to wrap up the tone that Garland was trying to convey here, wrapping up the whole thing to be one day in a years-long war that was ultimately, again, unnecessary. Having the photo montage occur before the credits, just… I’m conflicted about my own feelings about this, especially considering Ray Mendoza was in front of a lot of the production, again, someone who was actually in the battle being dramatized by actors. I really think it could have been saved for after the credits began rolling… Would have made it more near-perfect than it is. Oh, and the fact that I wonder why the hell if they’re gonna make a film about American soldiers, why not hire American actors, rather than get like two British guys and an Irish guy… Something I felt was a weird decision up until the movie started, and then being enveloped in it led me to forget about those feelings.

This needs to be seen in theaters. Perhaps not a date movie. I saw it alone at Regal at 2 PM on a Saturday and it was an incredible time. It screened in my favorite theater in Regal, theater 4, where the top row is separated by a large thing, so I had the four seats top left all to myself.
4-12
The Ballad Of Wallis Island
 Damn!!! Great lil movie. I think I saw the trailer for it once a month ago, and I said to Tiff that we had to see that indie looking crap. It was in a relatively packed theater too (Regal Tuesday, for one), so I suppose other people thought the same. What I was expecting to be a quirky little indie comedy about a washed 2010’s indie/folk musician was almost exactly that, but it’s also surprisingly funny, which I wasn’t expecting, almost entirely due to Tim Key, who plays the really rich guy who paid these indie musicians to come to his island to perform for only him (his riches from from lottery wins; not just once, but twice). He’s hilariously annoying, and while a more cynical movie would probably push some kind of parasocial theme, but here, he’s made to just be the biggest fan of this 2012-ass indie duo, performed by Tom Basden and Carey Mulligan. The entire movie is filmed on this island, and with a few (great) side characters, the thing relies on the chemistry between these three, and it’s very much there. Basden and Mulligan, without too much exposition, clearly had some kind of romance years prior while also doing the music stuff, and of course we have some Complete Unknown type stuff, but most of the themes revolve around aging, coming to terms with, things like that. There’s loads of funny banter, mostly between Key and Basden—I mean, Key really never shuts the fuck up, but like the audience, Basden ends up surrendering his own annoyance towards him. I found myself laughing a lot. And again, these things could turn much more cynical, but they never do. The tone of it reminded me of a movie like The Holdovers, a low-stakes movie that doesn’t bask in conflict, it just feels like… a film from a different time. Because I don’t see stuff like this existing too much in a place like Regal. But it makes me optimistic! This couldn’t have had too big of a budget. It was a short-film previously shot by the director, re-written and re-filmed for the big screen. But I get it. It must be difficult, even when the stakes are low, to make promises about making the money back from said budget. I noticed that this will only be playing in theaters for like five days (and by the time this is published, it may already be pulled from Regal???). Bullshit! One of the better movies I’ve seen this year, definitely the most surprised I’ve been. Maybe you can catch it on streaming or some shit soon; it isn’t a movie that really relies on the cinema, but as always, it’s preferred. Props to Regal for even throwing this in the roster between Minecraft and Drop (Blumhouse). Anyways loved this movie. We caught it at a 7:20 showing. We ate chocolate peanut butter cups, these chocolate-mint balls, and these gummy carrot/peas from Trader Joe’s, and and a popcorn which I got for free with Regal points.

4-7
The Minecraft Movie
 In my last review, I complained a fair amount about a specific type of contrived laughter from a certain kind of theater-goer. I am not always such a grump about this kind of thing. When I saw videos of entire groups of kids getting kicked out of the cinema for going apeshit over a specific scene in Minecraft; like, actually removed by police, I knew I had to see it.

I have pretty much never played Minecraft. I can remember as far back as 2012 when I would eat at this Chinese restaurant and the kids of the owners would be playing it on an iPad. I frequented this place enough to get to know them some and they would always show me their new builds. In the modern age, my experience with it is doing the same with my nephew, now 6, who wants to show me his stuff on the game whenever I’m visiting. I’m not sure what I’m looking at, but I do like how it looks, it reminds me mildly of builder games I liked as a kid, and I like the cows and everything. So I’m a big enough fan. I didn’t plan to see the movie, but once I saw a certain kind of hype around it, I thought, hell, why not? The chicken jockey scene and it’s virility is the kind of thing that makes me want to see a movie. It’s nice when the People all come together in this way, like BarbieHeimer a couple years ago, which, I still haven’t seen Oppenheimer, but I love the clip on TikTok when the guy in the crowd farts right after the atomic bomb button is pressed. That’s what got me to see The Minecraft Movie, basically.

I decided very last minute to see a 2 PM showing for this on a Saturday. I was on a walk and was near Regal and knew that Tiff wouldn’t want to see this with me, and this was my only chance. I stopped in Trader Joe’s a couple blocks away to get a couple snacks. I sat in the theater at 2:20, 20 minutes after showtime. I was worried I would miss any trailers (even though, this being a PG-rated movie, I would only be getting PG-rated trailers), but I made it in time. There was one trailer for a new Superman movie, which was one of the longest trailers I have ever seen. I feel like it was 5 minutes. The movie started rolling at 2:25, as always. Again, again, again, if you ever want to skip trailers, know that the actual movie begins 25 minutes after showtime.

The Minecraft movie is directed by Jared Hess, which I didn’t know until the credits began rolling; most known for directing Napoleon Dynamite, the first 25 or 30 minutes of the movie very much feels like Napoleon Dynamite, as you probably know if you have read any kind of review about it. It takes place in rural Idaho, tater tot jokes, quirky teacher types; I’m not mad about any of it, I mean I assume Hess was hired to inject his style into this for an audience too young to have seen ND.

Jack Black plays as Steve, who exists in Minecraft land (the overworld). Jason Momoa plays the Garbage Man, a washed-up 80’s arcade champion of sorts, broke, attempting to make ends meet with his retro game store by reselling finds from storage locker auctions. These kids play the main kids in the film, I don’t know their names and I don’t remember their names in the movie, 12-year-old kid and his young-adult daughter, moving to rural Idaho after the death of their mom, they’re OK. They befriend their real estate agent, who I don’t know her name either but she’s one of the better characters from the OG Netflix Original Orange Is The New Black, another early 2010’s staple. It made me think these whole thing with Jack Black and everything was written that long ago, and there’s so many writers in the credits for it that I believe it. Anyways all those characters end up traveling into Minecraft to rescue Jack Black and all this shit. I don’t want to sound like a fake Minecraft head by messing up the set up/exposition, but it’s like the Barbie movie, or the Mario one, both from 2023, people go into video game land and shake things up some/older toy/game IP repurposed with millennial humor movie. I have no idea why the real estate agent joins the kids on their journey into Minecraft, like what is at stake her for to go with them? But it’s cute. Speaking of I don’t know why it’s there, but Jennifer Coolidge is in this as well, playing one of the principal of the real-world school. Same lush lady as she always plays, and she’s given this side plot that exists halfway through the movie and then it is never revisited… Talk about rewrites…?

It borrows stuff from Barbie, and Mario, and some of the Lego movie (with all the themes of “If you’re a kid with a creative mind then you can do anything!!!”), with said Jared Hess style humor. A lot of the action reminds me of the Mario movie, except I know all of the characters, cameos, and Easter eggs in that one, and I am just learning about Chicken Jockey. But when he came on the screen, the crowd went crazy. Not to the degree that it occured on Tiktok; that one was way more Brocolli-hair teenage style, and all the kids that got excited during my viewing were probably like 8 or 9 years old. I was reminded of when I saw Pokemon: The First Movie in theaters opening day, seeing Mew on the screen for the first time, almost unable to contain how stoked I was to actually be seeing this, to the point where I had to see it again, the same day. I saw the Pokémon movie three times during it’s theatrical run (which was probably a much longer run, movies generally played for a longer period because theaters were a place people actually went to frequently etc. etc. etc.).

It’s easy to attack the movie industry for never taking chances, only making adaptations, remakes, reboots, of unoriginal properties. But I think there’s a way to do it well, and it doesn’t even have to be a “necessary evil.” Like, was the Pokemon movie actually good? Yeah, tbh, yes… And was The Minecraft Movie actually good? In a certain way, yes… It does exactly what it intends to do, which is to entertain kids, give fans of the franchise something to be excited about, give parents a place to take their kids for two hours (it’s an hour-and-40 long)… Hell, I liked it. Momoa is constantly funny in it, Jack Black is good when he’s with Momoa, as well. The jokes are good without ever having to do the “subtle adult humor” thing (too much… it does happen some). The action is fun, the overworld looks like the game, or what I know of it… It does make me wish I had known a little about the game some so I could catch any Easter eggs I’m missing. I didn’t spend too much time actually reviewing this thing. If you like this kind of thing, if you like Barbie, Mario, you should see it. If you’re on the more cynical side, I’m not gonna be the one to try convincing you about it. It’s cute!

4-5
Secret Mall Apartment
 I don't get many direct questions in response to my reviews (feel free to e-mail me). One of the more common ones, though, is what my trip is with Regal... Like, why am I not more open to seeing hipsta style movies at hipsta style movie theaters??? When I started doing these reviews, it was exclusive to Tuesdays at Regal; part due to it gave me more of a reason to be consistent with seeing a movie weekly, but moreso because it was cheap. Since 2023, though, I've become an absolute regular at the Delancey Regal. Getting recognized by the theater managers, ticket booth folk, and concession stand legends is a feeling that I am willing to pay 20-something a month for. I don't get that kind of treatment at the lame ass hipsta coffee shops by my apartment, and I give them $20-$120 a month, depending on the season.

I've gone to a few other theaters since then, though (not Metrograph), mostly at AMC and Regal cinemas in other cities, like in Connecticut and Missouri. I've attended two at the IFC in the West Village this year, and although both experiences were good, and both films were good (including the one I will be reviewing here), I felt annoyed by the actual audience. IFC is clearly going to have a different crowd as opposed to the random heros that show up at a 9PM showtime for a PG-13 Blumhouse flick at Regal Mall, I am aware... We are seeing indie-style documentaries and 25-year-old Japanese movies and shit there. But the audience is just... Annoying as hell. I noticed it when we saw Love & Pop last month, when the guy next to me was doing this performative-ass laugh for his girlfriend/date at all these scenes that didn't really need a laugh, weren't even that funny really. I feel like a real grouch saying this. Am I going to laugh out loud when I watch I Love You, Man by myself? Possibly not (but possibly so). Am I going to laugh if I'm watching it with my girlfriend? Probably. I am being a bit of a hypocrite. I am known to contradict myself with things like this. I literally laughed a few times during this movie. It's, how about this. It's why I never got into the idea of Rocky Horror, or why, even though I like Big Lebowski, I wouldn't want to watch it at one of those showings where everyone yells all the lines. I get that something like this would bring joy to a bunch of folks, but you know what... I'm not Him. The laughter here wasn't as bad as it was at Love & Pop, or something like The Room, probably, but I noticed my annoyance at both of them. So, I guess I don't like going to the hipsta ass places because I am that much of a hipsta.

Really though, the IFC is a nice theater. They play good stuff, it's at a cool location. It feels cool being on that little corner. If you watch Jefferson Pang's part in Skypager, he does a line in an orange shirt where he's going down 3rd Street, and you can see the theater. Really cool.

I first heard about this documentary Secret Mall Apartment about a year ago. I was in Providence with Tiff visiting some friends, and we decided to go to the mall together. I had never heard of the lore before, but it was explained to me that during the W. Bush presidency, some artist types broke into a vacant section of the very mall we were in, and partially lived there for several years. There was a documentary out about it, but it had only been screened at a festival or two. It was finally given a theatrical run, going to not Regal, but IFC. Tiff booked us a Thursday night showtime for 7:10.

We walked towards the West Village about an hour before the showtime. We would have to get there a little early. Here's the kicker with IFC; unlike Regal, and this is old school as hell!!! But you aren't assigned seats, rather, it's first-come-first-serve. Tiff wanted to eat something before, so we stopped at Wegman's. She got beef jerky and chips (for the movie) and sushi (for before). We walked to Washington Square Park (another location for Jefferson Pang's Skypager part) and she ate it at the fountain while we watched the skaters pretend to skate. We hurried to IFC after, making it early enough to get my favorite seats; the top-left corner. Instead of being given commercials for Starry and car insurance, we got a little montage of different mall scenes from older-style movies, and Siskel&Ebert reviews. Cute, more fun than Regal, I admit. We were given a 5-minute short about D&D and then a couple trailers, and then the film started (15 minutes from showtime, a ten-minute difference from Regal. Another IFC win. See? It's not all complaints.).

Secret Mall Apartment is a documentary about the Providence Mall in Providence, Rhode Island. We follow a crew of local artists who, about four years after the mall opened, found that there was an area within the building that had been completely vacant, and about the size of a small apartment. You know what comes next...!

Interspersed is a lot of really cool early 00's digital camera footage from Michael & The Gang's squatting (a very apt time for this documentary to come out, as that style of footage is very on trend right now, and yes, nostalgic for us millenials) with floating-head interviews. A crew of eight spend several years furnishing this zone to the point where it really does become their own little apartment, although you realize pretty soon into the movie that none of these guys were actually living here; like at most, at the most extreme was like four or five days, I think? So I wouldn't say that they were by definition by squatting, and it doesn't seem like any of them are claiming that, but maybe the filmmakers are (I guess it needs a name). It becomes more of a place for this group of artists to get together to work on more liberal-arts-leaning things, like creating "Tape art" murals in children's hospitals and in post-9/11 NYC, which gives the audience a reason to not think these are just a bunch of vandalizing dickheads (Not that I'm against it, personally, but there were points when I was thinking, man, these guys can kind of just get away with anything, I wonder why, and then there's a minute or two long portion where they all are saying how they never overestimated their white privilege, or something like that. Like, "If I was a POC, I would have never gotten away with this, and I think that's a problem." Ok, and your solution is so... Make a vlog of hanging out and drinking milk in this mall that you're vandalizing? Nah, they seem like good people though.).

The hideout becomes more of a lifestyle decision for Michael, the main artist of the bunch, a bit older than the rest at like 32, but he has a young man's charm to him. He's likeable, and along with the Tape Art (his invention), most of this stuff seems to be his organizing. I'd say the movie is a portion about the Mall Apartment, a portion about Michael's upbringing and art career, a portion about Providence and it's gentrification, and then some stuff about the liberal-arts do-goody stuff the group of nice people do. There wasn't really enough stuff solely about the mall to fill in the 90 minutes, I'm sure... although in a perfect world, this documentary would have consisted only of the digital camera footage, edited and organized in a linear fashion, from beginning to end, with no narration, vlog style (most of this footage predates Youtube, btw; doesn't matter but it's cool to think about). But it seemed like after a couple years they mostly gave up on the filming/documenting aspect of the thing, and seemed more interested in hanging out in there and drinking milk (based on the documentation, they weren't really doing explicit kinds of partying/debauchery in the apartment, which is cute). To fill in some of the space towards the end stages of the Mall Apartment where they failed to film, they had some reenactment scenes that were funny. And then there's a whole section about these less artistic artists who attempted to recreate the Mall Apartment in present-day (these were just fans of the Mall Apartment, but never actually went there), which is pointless as a concept and slows the movie down. Oh well!

It's a nice documentary, it's about as cutesy and hipster-y as I was anticipating from the trailer, but no more than that. The footage is edited into it nicely, again I wish it could have just been only this stuff, it would have looked like a found-footage film, but Ob-La-Di. It's a fun quick watch, and provides a nice little glance at a cool era of time that is ripe for nostalgia (INDIE SLEAZE! Nah, none of that crap here. But we do get a guy from Lightning Bolt telling us some stuff). As I think more about the stuff I didn't like about it, I feel like it's so minor that it isn't worth complaining about. Then again, I feel regret already about having complained about the laughing people from earlier. I may just not like many forms of having fun. But I did have fun watching this! Except... If you recall, Tiff brought chips into the theater, and they were way too damn loud, and it didn't seem like she cared at all. This is why gummy and chocolate are the gold standards in the theater, even above popcorn.

3-27
Black Bag
 Seeing a movie on a classic Regal Tuesday is always a joy, as is seeing the newest flick from the crazy mind of Steven Soderbergh. I'm kidding a little bit about that; this is the guy who most notably made the Ocean's series, but the guy's work is so varied. Last year I saw "Unsane" which I thought was great. Finding out it was a Soderbergh thing made me realize I needed to expand more on my knowledge of the mf's work. I feel like I already talked about this earlier this year with my review of his haunted-thriller "Presence." Yes, he already has two movies out in theaters by Q2 of this year, and they are very different movies; and when you look through his filmography, you realize it's all very different movies, to the point where you find yourself trying to create some common thread, be it thematically or cinematographer-lly between them all. This was a guy who directed Sex Lies & Videotape, which ushered in a whole something or rather, not far off from a Kevin Smith with Clerks; they have both had a decades-long career, but only one has been pretty consistently good throughout that span. Yes, it seems like Soderb. directs big-budget things like the Ocean things and then is able to fund films that he would be more passionate (I assume) about, like the 2006 Bubble, or Unsane, or the one where he tackles the Pharma industry and Rooney Mara goes crazy.

Presence seemed a little more like a Soderbergh passion project, whereas Black Bag is closer to one of his Oceans. They are both around 90 minutes, and they are both good, is the thread here.

I met Tiff around 6:30 at Gotham Burger. Our showtime for Black Bag was 7:10. I felt a little bit of stress from the time crunch, but after a couple years of research I have learned that the actual film doesn't start until 25 minutes; this, for most of the things I've seen at Regal, is almost exact. So really we had about an hour to eat burgers (and as far as these kinds of Smash burg type of place, Gotham has become my favorite out of them. Good price, good vibe, great flavor. If you don't like sauce-y stuff though you may not like it.) and go to Trader Joe's for snacks. We at the damn burgers and fry, and we briskly walked to TJ's for chocolate and gummy and possibly dry fruit-y. We got to the theater at 7:20. If you are a fan of trailers, then you should know that the actual trailers don't even start until ten minutes past showtime. I like to see them. We got in a minute or two before they started. We were sat in the middle of the cinema, to the far right side. It was a mostly-filled theater, which I was happy to see.

Black Bag is a spy thriller that follows M. Fassbender and C. Blanchett, a married spy couple, and a few of their underlings. Fassbender's character is made aware of a traitor in his circle, and he has to investigate who it is; one of the potential suspects being his wife (played by Blanchett). It spares us a lot of the action-y aspects of many of these kinds of films, and trades it out for a much more dialogue-heavy plot; it ends up being a little more like what British spies do in their time between being spies (which the spy lifestyle, it seems, you are always a spy. So it all involves spying to some degree), and a lot of it is fraternizing type of stuff, you know, spies fucking other spies and the like. Fassbender and Blancett play a very dedicated/loyal married couple, and you don't want to believe that her character could do anything to betray Fassbender (who is so straightfaced in this that it feels like his veins are popping out of his neck; he's hilarious in it). The supporting cast, the other four spy types, are all good too. There are a lot of scenes of them at dinner together, sitting in therapist offices, things like that. One of the best scenes in this is when Fassbender is giving them all lie dector tests, the way it's edited is funny and memorable. I'll be honest, I'm writing this nearly a two weeks after seeing it, which is so very wrong. It's a short film that moves fast, and it's enjoyable, to the point where when I could tell it was nearing the end, I was like, how is this almost over already? It feels brief, but it's a nicely wrapped little story. The ending is a little explain-y, in a way that Soderbergh often likes to do (not so much in Presence, however), but it's done well and ties it all together. It's like watching a small glimpse into something, and we overhear things in it without being given much exposition, which we don't need; we are told what we need to know and can intuit some of the other stuff (a quality that was in Presence). There is a voyeuristic nature to it, not to the degree of Presence, which relies on a certain kind of POV filming to give it that quality, but it feels like you're listening in on a natural conversation between a bunch of funny British folk who happen to be spies. It's worth seeing in theaters, but it's also a movie that you could easily watch at home. I don't think the theater experience really benefits or hinders it... I mean of course I'd rather watch it in Regal, but. You could just watch it on your laptop or your projector or whatever. The twisted mind of Soderbergh...

3-18
Novocaine
I was facing some turmoil this Sunday afternoon, so I figured I could kill a few hours of daylight by seeing a movie. Especially considering that we are now a week into daylight saving's (which I guess we are still saving? I swear we were ridding of it???), I would be able to get out of the movie and walk home before sundown.

There were showtimes for Novocaine and Black Bag, both at the same time. I was leaning more towards B. Bag, but Tiff texted me and said she possibly wanted to see that with me. So OK, Novocaine at 4:10 it is. It was an RPX movie, so supposedly the chairs vibrate more, the sound is better, something like that? I had to pay 6 dollars for it, 5.50 more than I was used to. I am in no way sold on the RPX technology. This is the fourth or fifth movie I've seen with it and it does nothing for me. I completely forgot about it until just now. For a non-unlimited RPX ticket, it's going to run you closer to like 28 dollars, which is unbelieveable as fuck.

I walked to Regal from home. I left at 3:55. I got to Regal Mall at 4:05, which gave me enough time to walk through the mall and buy one cookie at the cookie stand. I was twisted up about whether or not I had time to go to TJ's before, so I didn't. I got into the theater at 4:10. The trailers didn't start until 4:22. The film didn't start until 4:35. This is normal to me now, but I was already in a bit of a weird mood, and it annoyed me this time, especially getting no new trailers. The theater was probably 25% capacity, so I was lucky to get to sit in the top corner, at least. I ate my one cookie and waited a horrendous amount of time for the new Jack Quaid film to start.

Novocaine is the new Jack Quaid film. Regal has had a 15-foot poster on their front window promoting it for months now, like possibly before 2025. This movie takes place around Christmas time; it doesn't really matter in the plot, but there are Christmas trees and Santa Claus outfits in the background, which makes me think this was supposed to release in December. Either way, it didn't. What it does have is Jack Quaid, as I have said time and time again. I hadn't seen a trailer for this once; just the huge poster. I assumed this would be a movie about a dentist, but it has nothing to do with dentistry at all. But Jack Quaid, again is in it, at least.

Jack Quaid, Randy's lil' son, plays Nathan, a quiet bank executive type; he has the virgin-like charm of Steve Carrell in 40-Year-Old-Virgin (And I think the character is a virgin, but he's only 30). He gets a tiny bit of ass from a coworker, which makes him super happy. And then these bank robbers dressed up as Santa Claus rob the bank the next day, again with the Christmas stuff; the robbery stuff changes the tone of the movie out of nowhere. The robbers shoot and kill the bank manager and then kidnap the girl who's ass he got and we follow him the rest of the movie trying to save her; if only he himself had watched 40-Year-Old-Virgin, he would know that there's no ass worth getting that worked up about (to paraphrase).

The main twist here is that Nathan has CIP, a rare illness that prevents him from feeling any kind of pain. So for the remainder of the film, we see him get burned, broken, fucked up all to hell, and he keeps coming back. It's mostly played up in a gory-comedy kind of way, and sometimes it's nasty to look at, some of the crap happening. He punches broken glass and then hits a guy in the eyes with it. He stabs somebody with a compound fracture-d arm. It plays kind of like Bob Odenkirk's 2021 movie Nobody, but with a sillier, slapsticky tone. Nobody, if I recall, was kind of tense, a little more of a kettle boiler type of thing; not to mention the action scenes were very good (I immediately remember the bus fight). Novocaine is almost never tense, and it feels more like something from 2010. Jack Quaid's character is full of Ruddisms (He shoots a guy in the head-to death-and asks him, "Are you OK?").

There are some twists in the film that are silly as hell, and for the last 40 minutes or so, the goofiness just goes on a little too long. It's nearly a 2-hour movie, and it doesn't need to be.

IRT plot: Jack Quaid was also the star of Companion, which I saw a couple months prior. Both movies could have had preventable issues within the plots if the main character didn't seem to forget that they had a cellphone. It's such an annoying thing I've been seeing in movies. It happens in Riff Raff as well, AND Flight Risk (Novocaine and Flight Risk both have awesome scenes in which a character has to escape from a pair of handcuffs in a gruesome way; I think I liked Wahlberg's technique more, but it's cool here too). In this film, our hero will answer his phone if the fucking police are calling him... And he never bothers to call the women he's trying to save? It would be an ambitious thing to do, but it'd probably solve a lot of problems early on.

There's a lot of stupid stuff happening like this, but, like Flight Risk, to enjoy it you have to just know what the thing is trying to be. This is a comedic-action thing, and it's pretty heavy on both. For instance, there's a scene where our hero is being tortured; literally getting his fingernails pulled off with pliers; and he has to pretend that it is causing him pain. He starts acting (again) like the 40 y/o virgin, in the scene when he gets his chest waxed.

I like Jack Quaid here. I liked him in Companion, too. I believe I am biased. Prior to this stint, I knew him from his guest appearances on RedLetterMedia, which probably helped with his PR stuff. For example: I like him. He has an Adam Scott kind of thing to him. He's likeable. In Companion, though, he was given a "Secret evil guy who acts nice" Nice Guy role which is the most common role a Guy can be given in this era, so it's Nice to have him just playing a Nice Guy Here.

Companion and Novocaine had pretty similar lower-end mid-range budgets, but Companion was a rare (in 2025 standards) box office smash. Again, I never saw a damn trailer for this. I saw trailers for Companion. I saw subway ads. I saw those videos on Tiktok where somebody who was clearly paid to speak highly of the film tries as organically as possible to say they weren't paid to speak highly of the film. If the majority of movies being released nation-wide aren't "good" (Which is the last remaining way to ensure that it'll get people's asses in the seats), it needs hefty marketing. Longlegs performed this brilliantly last year, which was kind of devious on their behalf, but again, it got people's asses in seats. I don't know where I'm going with this. Novocaine is certainly not a good movie, but it's an enjoyable theatrical experience (with our without the pointless-ass RPX seats. Fuck RPX). Companion was too, but I liked it about the same amount. Maybe I liked Companion less because I was exposed to it via advertising a lot more. I can be contrarian like that. I felt myself comparing the two while watching Novocaine. So I'll say this; I probably liked Companion a little more than I let on, I probably like Novocaine less than I'm acting (Seriously, it's silly as hell. If you like gory silly action stuff then sure). I like Jack Quaid solely based on his appearances on Youtube shows I like. I'm a sucker for marketing, too, and the scale for it can tip either way. Mane! See this with a group of friends for all I care, it's at least fun.

3-16
Mickey 17
I’ve been anticipating the release of M17 since last year. I know it's been set to release since 2023. I can’t remember when I saw the trailer—and then there was a moment where they revamped the trailer entirely, adding a new, later release date—which only lasted for a short time before going back to the old trailer after the fact, with the original release date, probably on accident. But we finally get it, a couple years and a new presidency later.

In Regal fashion, I like to see movies on Tuesdays, but having a movie I was actually excited about, I felt like I had to see it opening night, like back in Missouri, when I would see something every Friday.

The only real difference now is the price. I have Regal Unlimited, and having had it for a year now, I can say it is well worth it. So my ticket is zero dollars. However, I have to cop Tiff’s ticket as well, and on a Friday night, her ticket alone is $23. This made me feel pissed immediately, which made me feel ashamed for having felt pissed about $23.

I relayed all of this to Tiff, who remembered that you can get free tickets to movies with rewards points. Most of the rewards points that I accumulate are from getting a ticket for Tiff every Regal Tuesday, and I only use the points on popcorn, and that's only once in awhile. I checked my points; I had 16,000. To get one of the free tickets, I would need 18,000 points. So to experiment, I purchased two tickets for movie for Tuesday night ($10 total), which granted me around 2,000 more points, giving me enough for the free ticket. So tonight’s Friday opening movie was free—OK, it was a 50-cent "convenience" fee for mine and a 2-dollar one for Tiff’s, so it was $2.50, and now I have to see “The Rule Of Jenny Pen” at 6:20 this Tuesday, so that's a trade of some sort.

We got a showtime for 6:10, which wasn’t an available showtime when I first looked; I think it got added very last-minute once they started filling seats for all the showtimes (I checked a day before and all that was available for the 6, 7, and 9 o’clock were all front seats) —This movie has been promoted heavily, and I think it's about all there is to see at the moment.

6:10 is an interesting showtime for a movie if you plan on getting dinner around it. I like to get dinner before the movie, although some say that it should always be movie first, as you may find yourself clock-watching during the meal. We decided to go to New Spicy Village at like 4:30, which is a hilariously early dinner (and it also turns out that they have lunch specials that we weren’t aware of, which made what Tiff was wanting, the Oxtail Hui Mei, even cheaper. I got the Beef Brisket Huy Mei, which wasn’t at all what I was wanting, but it was suitable and good).

After dinner we had more than enough time to get snacks for the movie, which was what I was hoping for; that we would have a light (and early) enough dinner to where we would have the time and will to get a bunch of snacks from Trader Joe’s. Tiff had already secured jelly beans at Walgreens earlier in the day, so that was one. We walked to TJ’s, a couple blocks from Regal, and got dried mango, a chocolate bar, chocolate peanut butter cups, and this bag of cheesy popcorn. We stopped in Target as well because Tiff needed a new nail file; while there, we got Cadbury eggs (dark chocolate). So we had about six things to choose from during the movie, seven if you count the nail file.

We got to Regal at 6:06, and sat down in the theater (the very-back corner; my favorite. I don’t have a preference on left or tight, but normally if they’re both available, I go with the left) at 6:10.

We got one trailer at 6:20 for “The Amateur,” and then an ad for Progressive and then the movie started at 6:25. 6:25!!! That is only 15 minutes after the posted showtime, about 15-20 minutes shorter than what I’m used to here at Regal. I enjoy trailers, so getting just one was kind of blue balls (especially throwing it in the middle of Mountain Dew/Starry ads and the movie trivia which I was able to get right this time, only from getting them wrong on Tuesday), but it was pleasant to be able to get right into the movie (basically).

Oh, and if you somehow missed Anora, it’s still got a few weeks of showing left; kind of smart for whoever got it the Oscar win, definitely helped eek out some last minute publicity/box office sales four, five months later. But there isn’t much else out right now that’s worth your money. Mickey 17 would have been worth the $23 for two tickets.

One funny sidenote about our showing; it was advertised on the Regal app as having closed captions, which I was like, ok, fine, I can deal with subtitles. I didn’t even realize until after the movie when Tiff brought it up to me that we didn’t even have subtitles. A flub, I guess? Again, I think it was a very late addition to showtimes for the night.

Mickey 17 is a sci-fi thriller comedy set on a space station in 2050-something. Robert Pattinson is an “Expendable” on this spaceship, meaning he has an infinite life cheat (they reprint his body after each death), so he is used to cure illnesses, things like that. He has died 16 times, hence the number (which we aren’t revealed the title card “Mickey 17” until about 45 minutes into the movie!!! As a huge fan of Friday the 13th: Part 2, this was a great moment for me). He’s a pretty good spirit about dying, too. Pattinson is ultimately likable here, and I think has been in most of everything I’ve seen him in since 2012-13 when he started playing a limo driver in every Cronenberg movie. He’s always fucking around with that girl from Blink Twice, Naomi Ackie (also likable here, much more than in Blink Twice). They’re always having fucking sex! There ends up being two Robert Pattinsons, which is an issue with the head of the operation (played by Mark Ruffalo and Toni Collette). “Multiples,” are supposed to be put to death, so much of what the Pattinsons are doing during the second act of the movie are hiding, while also doing a Jekyll/Hyde thing (every new Mickey has a slightly different persona; #18 is more of a Luigi Mangione type).

All while Ruffalo’s character is on a quest to take over this planet filled with this Jet Force Gemini-looking bug monsters so they can cut off their tails and Toni Collette can make sauce with it. Anywho.

Speaking of Ruffalo; I think he’s doing a quasi-Trump thing? It seems like somebody trying to do a Trump accent. His followers wear red hats and all. He plays a great villain (both shown here and previously in Poor Things) and it isn’t always funny but it can be. Collette was somehow gonna be in this no matter what—she’s in everything!!!—but she plays the string- pulling wife well. Lots of stuff about class struggle, war, political propaganda—all are here, in short little bursts—are explored when the plot centers around these two; sometimes it slows things down for me. But it’s a newer-style movie, a post-COVID film, it reminds me of super on-the-nose politcal comedies like “Don’t Look Up” and “Triangle of Sadness”. It's much more fun than those, but often I felt annoyed by the preachy stuff. I was surprised that this was even a Bong Joon-ho film (although Paraside has "themes" in it about class etc I recall it being a lot more subtle). The entire premise feels more like a Yorgos Lanthimos thing with a tacked on "the rich are bad" thing. It can be grating sometimes, especially with Ruffalo doing some kind of impression; I know he probably isn't trying to do an exact Trump thing but it's so obvious and just feels silly. It's stuff my dad would find funny. Personally, am I moved by the political discourse in the film? No. I just got sad whenever they hurt one of the alien bug things.

But did I like the movie? Yeah!!! It's a lot of fun. There’s a lot of fun stuff happening throughout the entire 2hr17m duration; sometimes too much, lots of subplots, themes and "messages" and then it just cuts to the bug/alien Creeper things. Again, at it is fun, so this isn't a complaint, but I could see somebody complaining about it. Pattinson sells the whole thing though. He's incredible as both Mickey 17 and 18 (again, 18 being a little more like Luigi, which wasn't the purpose when it was written but has a different meaning now). The universe takes place in the near-future but has that dystopian/cynical “everyone is dumb” kind of felling like in the aforementioned “Don’t Look Up” or something like "Beau is Afraid"— this style always makes me think of someone who read a little too much Saunders, but it works here, and doesn’t beat you over the head with it (it does beat you over the head with the political stuff, though. I was in a good mood so it didn't bother as much as it could have, but let it be a warning to you). It’s a fun watch, and one of the first sci-fi or sci-fi-adjacent things I’ve seen in recent times that I would probably watch again. This is probably going to have to sit at the top of my “Best of 2025” list for now, unless I decide that I actually liked “Flight Risk” more.

3-7
Riff Raff
Riff Raff is a 2024 action (?) thriller (??) comedy (???) film which has nothing to with Riff Raff the guy. I hadn’t seen any trailers or any sort of promotion leading up to this; it was between this and “My Dead Friend Zoe,” which I had also not seen anything about besides a synopsis on the Regal app. I was hoping to see that one, but Riff Raff had a 7:30 showtime, which worked for Tiff and I meeting up to get dinner beforehand. We went to Cafe Himalaya around 6:45, which I was hoping would give us enough time to stop at Trader Joe’s for snacks, but it was too close to the showtime when we got to the theater, so we picked up some things at the Regal Mall (this, for those not living in NYC, is the Essex Market, which is connected to the theater; it’s a little easier for me to label the whole thing under Regal, though) instead.

Once the trailers started at like, 7:40, I realized we probably did have enough time to get stuff at TJ’s, and it pissed me off more than the tardy showtime thing usually does. We saw Love & Pop last week at the IFC, and the movie started exactly, and I mean exactly, at 7:45, which was the advertised showtime. Not to mention that the seats are first-come-first-serve, which until the Regal shit has always been what I was used to. It’s fucked to consider that with Regal or AMC, you have to tack on an extra 30 minutes between the showtime and the actual movie starting. 30 minutes, minimum, every single time—it’s normally closer to 35, with all the Mountain Dew, Pepsi, and Starry ads, all back to back—to the people at Pepsi Co, can you guys not just consolidate all the fucking drinks into one one-minute thing?

And this is somebody who likes to see all the trailers... It’s bullshit that you are actually being punished for getting there early, for fucks sake, for getting there ON TIME... But the movie itself may have put me in a bit of a mood. I wish that we had been late to this one.

It is only the beginning of March as I type this but Riff Raff is the worst thing I’ve seen in theaters this year. The top-billed people in this are Bill Murray and Pete Davidson, which they are in it for probably 20 percent of the whole thing. Here’s the thing: I’ve actually grown to like Davidson, around the release of The King of Staten Island, but he is pretty pointless here. Bill Murray is somebody who I thought was funny when I was a kid, and then throughout the Obama and first Trump presidency I got really tired of his “It’s Bill-Freakin’-Murray” cameo-type thing. I have grown to despise him in nearly any appearance he makes. They play gangster type hitmen here, but Bill Murray’s character seems to be propped up like Weekend at Bernies (he would be Bernie here. I’m saying Bill Murray is lifeless as an actor and personality at this point. Let's throw in the towel, Bill!!!).

The movie follows Ed Harris—his current wife of 18 years and by-marriage son (the wife and son are black; this doesn’t matter in the plot BTW)—and his mostly estranged son from his former life and his ex-girlfriend-wife type (played by Jennifer Coolidge, who plays herself and you know what to expect if you’ve seen anything from her in the last, twenty, twenty-five years? “I’d cut off my left tit for an advil”— she’s a lush, we get it. But she’s also one of the only funny things in the whole thing, and it’s like a 25% rate). Ed Harris’ character is a former hitman gangster type; this is revealed late in the movie but if you haven’t figured it out in the first five minutes you’re just fucked in the head, really. The whole thing plays out like A History Of Violence (which Ed Harris is also in!!!), which I think is an apt comparison, and I’d like to expand further on this, in some fashion.

A History Of Violence is a really strange Cronenberg film. It has a glossy look that makes it feel like a soap opera sometimes, there will be some silly high-school drama, and some of the dialogue just feels... daytime tv-ish. And then the you’ll be thrown into some unsettlingly brutal (and hyper-realistic) violence. It all feels intentional, Viggo M’s character acting as somebody else for a larger portion of his life, criminal life catching up to him... It’s compelling, an awesome movie. Riff Raff has no idea where it’s going, and tries a bunch of different formulas before crashing into a pretty nothing conclusion. It feels like something that the writers wanted to make into a TV show, but were forced to condense it into a 100-minute film (any longer... so help me God). There is not only forced exposition, but we also have to have these flashbacks to explain to us why something happened when it’s pretty fucking obvious why something happened (even if it makes no sense). The editing just feels like a TV show, and the writing for each character feels like somebody watched a season of The Bear and was like, OK, we need a bunch of cussing for each character.

(Side note; the beginning of the movie we are given a narrator (Ed Harris’ black son), which comes back into the film I believe two other times. It isn’t a device that’s useful in any way, and when it comes back, you’re like, Oh yeah, I forgot he was narrating). It starts with one of those, "OK, I know you want to know how we got here. Well, let's just take us all the way to the beginning..." And then half of the movie are flashbacks anyways. So by that rationale, he's actually taking us closer to the middle of the movie... This movie has very little going for it, I promise you.

Everything is the matter here. Everything is played for laughs, oftentimes past the point of annoyance, and then there will be a shift in tone where Bill Murray’s character shoots someone dead for no reason. His character is unlikeable, and Murray isn’t convincing as some sort of criminal type, besides that he says fuck and fuckin,’ as does every character in this. Davidson is pointless and could have been replaced with anyone, but then there’s characters like Coolidge’s, in which you can tell that a writer was writing the character for her—or in this case, asking Chat GPT to write dialogue that sounds like things she would say. Actually, I feel like saying that this film is AI-assisted is an insult to AI. I fully believe some folks wrote this thing, bandaged it together haphazardly, and whatever I'm seeing is what we got. With something like "Companion," I would believe AI did that. This feels like a group effort of really hasty people.

There is dysfunctional family/fatherhood/etc. themes that bubble up, but it’s all fucked up. At one point in one of the pointless flashbacks, we get Bill Murray’s son, going to his dad’s house to tell him he’s infertile, can’t have children. After a minute or two of light ribbing, Murray’s character is like “fuck you, get out of my house.” And then the son goes out and pushes a pregnant lady over? The pregnant lady being in cahoots with Ed Harris’ estranged (white) son, who defends her and kills him? Which leads to Murray exacting revenge? And this is all how we get to the climax? What the fuck???????

Again. Again! I have heard little about this film, and it makes sense why it’s been so quietly promoted, if at all. It has the charm of last year’s Argyle, which is to say that is has none. Skip this one, even though it seems like even the creators of it are asking you to. But maybe you’re one of those guys who wears a Bill Murray t-shirt, and you’d think he was funny in it.

3-4
Love & Pop

The first time I saw Love & Pop was only 8 or 9 months ago. I watched it with Tiff, who suggested we try it out; it had been in her watch list for awhile. I really liked it. On editing and cinematography alone, I was sold.

The other day, I get a text from her asking if I would want to see a remastered (I think) version of it at IFC. It had been probably two years since I went to a theater that was neither a Regal or AMC; I said, OK. The showtime was for 7:45. We had Hamburger America beforehand, as it was a couple blocks from the theater. We would go here more often last summer, but this time around it was not so great. The vibe there is always OK but the special chili burger they were serving was not lovely. We have recently been going to Gotham Burger Social Club, a place that by looking at it alone you would not think it would be worth a damn, but it’s great. This is a small detail, but the radio at Gotham plays billboard hits, which I think makes it more authentic. Most of these burger huts of the last decade want to replicate this dive-bar burger pub kind of thing but most of the places that they try to cosplay are in the middle of America, probably ran by high school employees, who probably pick the music. I don’t think this is intentional on behalf of Gotham, but it feels more believable than a curated Thin Lizzy type playlist.

We got to IFC theater at 7:43. We stopped in a deli next door because I didn’t think we would be pressed for time. We got a few snacks, and hurried in—not before I showed Tiff the little peephole thing outside of the building—if you’re near the IFC there is a set of binocular type things placed in the wall, put your face up to it next time. The moment we stepped in the theater (7:45), the lights went out. I asked Tiff where we were seated, and she reminded me that it was first-come-first serve. I hadn’t been used to this for a long time. I forgot that it used to be the incentive for getting to the theaters early. Back home, I used to sit in the parking lot of the theater with friends, eating twizzlers and shit. We wanted to have the back row of the cinema because we were a giggly bunch, so it was worth it for us to be hidden in the back. Plus my friend Isaac worked at Target at the time, and he would often clock out an hour or 90 minutes before showtime. With little to do in between that time, we would just hang out near the whip and listen to mix CDs. We'd get candy and energy drinks (RIP to Blue Amp, the greatest energy drink of all time) and kick it at the theater. We'd get our tickets in advance, and then do kickflips in the parking lot until it was time to for the movie to start.

At IFC, Tiff and I were barely able to find two seats together; fortunately there were some in the very middle of the place. It was packed. Some folks came in after us, probably as couples, and were less lucky. I don’t think they managed to find seats next to one another. No trailers, no warnings about no texting, no locally made skits with screaming women (If you’ve attended Regal in the last three months, you’ll have heard the word “SPORTS!” screamed before the showtime, one of those cheesy sketches that theaters find necessary to include before the screening. This one is way too loud, but in the last few movies I’ve attended, it seems that they have listened to peoples comments about it, and turned the volume down, specifically the “SPORTS” line).

Love & Pop is A 1998 Japanese comedy-drama that is really a great thing to watch. It gets labeled as an experimental film, but it has a pretty straightforward plot; the experimental thing I suppose is the low-budget nature, filmed entirely on either a VX1000 or a GL2 (somebody who spend more time on skateperception.com could probably give a more accurate answer on this), making it seem closer to one of those Dogme 95 style films, although it isn’t that either. We follow a Japanese high school girl who goes on dates with older men for money as she tries to make enough dough to afford this ring she wants. She runs around the city with her friends and they talk about nasty little things and hang out with freaky little Japanese guys throughout, but it doesn’t feel repulsive to be watching, like when you’re watching something like Kids (I haven’t seen this movie since 2005. You are sick for liking it.). There are themes of innocence blah blah. It’s a nearly 30-years-old film, it’s been talked about to death, you should see it. As somebody who has spent twenty years watching skate videos filmed with the same kind of camcorders and lenses and cross-dissolves, it feels very easy to watch for me. It’s a cutesy and often funny movie, which the guy next to me would agree with, as he was laughing at every single line and patch of silence between dialogue. His date or girlfriend or partner never laughed once. It really was annoying but it also made me think too much about Do I Do This Too? Nah, there’s no way...

I have no idea what was “remastered” about this screening. It still looked shitty to me. It’d be like mastering Flip’s Sorry or something like that?? I’m not complaining either, I can’t emphasize how much the filming and editing did for me. But I’m pleased to have seen it in the theater, and one I haven’t been to in a long time.

The crowd though at IFC is a little different than at Regal though. Lots of they/them Portland style folks (nothing wrong with dat!!!) with COVID masks (nothing wrong with dat!!!) and a lot of performative laughter as mentioned earlier (something wrong with dat!!!) and clapping during the credits (everything wrong with dat!!!). I forget that this partially is why I like Regal. No goofy ass hipsta runoff like at Metrograph, no protester-looking poly couples like at IFC, mostly just (and especially during the week) single 40+ men who just need somewhere to sit between shifts, oftentimes sleeping. So I prefer to stay at Regal. Great film.

2-26
Heart Eyes

Heart Eyes is a horror comedy in the style of something like SCREAM, especially the newer SCREAMs, even down to the main guy in it, who is from the newer SCREAMs. It’s a Valentine’s Day-themed horror film, but different enough from other Valentine’s Day-themed horror films to be it’s own thing (I like both the original My Bloody Valentine and the 2009 3D-gimmicked remake, and I have actually seen Valentine for some reason; don't have much to say about it, if that says anything).

We follow an advertising creative director type lady and her fellow employee (the hot charming guy from SCREAM that I was talking about) as they do this will-they-won’t they romance thing; interspersed is a serial-killer-on-the-loose plot, Heart Eyes, of course (he wears a mask with heart eyes; again, different enough from the other V-day horrors. I kind of like the Valentine mask the best though). That’s probably the best way to describe this film. It feels like a straight-up Hallmark movie with the romance stuff, and even with any kind of horror overlaid, it still feels Hallmark-y, like if Hallmark decided to add gore and F-words in the mix. There isn’t much violence in this, but there are a couple kills that had more gory detail than expected. The twist we get about the killer is hilariously obvious; like we are introduced to this random NPC type character half way in the movie and I remember someone in the crowd was just like "It's him." They try to add a secondary twist, which sure is less obvious, but it gives us an earful in the way of useless exposition.

There is little tension in anything that could be potentially tense, because there is always a character saying “Fucking fuck fuck!” or hitting the bad guy with a vibrator. Our main star will be getting chased by Heart Eyes, who we know hunts down couples (mostly). Our hero will yell to him, “We aren’t a couple!!!” A lot of this schtick throughout. I found a lot of it pretty annoying in the theater, but you know what, I kind of liked it in retrospect. I feel like most horror in 2025 is going to fall into this referential/meta/ “funny” category, and as long as it knows what it is, I guess I am OK with that. It isn’t a NEON or A24 horror. It’s a late-night movie for late-night couples on Valentine’s Day. I saw it alone, but I enjoyed it! (I AM NOT A INCEL!)

I saw this on a Saturday at like 2:30. It was cold as hell out and I wanted any reason to get out of the house. Heart Eyes is not a great movie, but it’s comparable to the new SCREAM movies. It’s enjoyable, and sometimes it doesn’t seem like it knows what it is, but I think that it does. It’s dumb fun with a lot of modern-style references about incels and kinks and whatever else square people think is taboo. But you know what... It was a good enough theater experience. People hated the My Bloody Valentine remake upon it’s release, but I had a great time seeing it in theaters back then. There were a lot of movies like that at the time, pretty shitty stuff verging on Grindhouse cosplay, but I have yet to forget the experience. Machete, Drive Angry 3D, stuff like that. I’m way more a champion of a good ass time at the cinema than a good movie at this point, and do I have a choice? I see 50-ish films per year, and most of them are gonna be closer to Argyle than Anora. At the very least, we can be given a good experience, a job that falls in the hands of the director. This movie is about as stupid as possible, and if it’s actually trying to be scary, then they failed at this. But it succeeds as a movie that in like twenty years I’ll watch a scene from on Youtube and remember the nice Saturday afternoon.

2-22
The Monkey
I got a text from Taylor in the afternoon asking me if I wanted to see The Monkey at 7. It was an early screening for a movie I’ve seen the trailer of at least five times, both green and re band. Ten years ago, the thought of a red band trailer was more exciting, but most of the time they follow the same formula. I guess this is true for green band trailers, too; there were two movie trailers back to back with: Female lead, background song is a slightly remixed/covered classic, gun shots being fired off to the beat of the song, pow pow pow pow! To the beat of some David Bowie cover.

So I had seen trailers for The Monkey a bunch of times. I was lukewarm about it, but I knew I would be seeing it. My mom had a copy of the book on our bookshelves since I was a little ass kid and I hated the cover of that one. That and IT (the clown) I had to hide behind the bookshelf at some point just because I didn’t even like the idea of me seeing the spines.

The Monkey is a horror comedy directed by Oz Perkins of Longlegs, a movie I believed that I liked at first, but later on decided only the first half was any good. It could have been a cool serious movie, but takes an OMG THAT HAPPENED? approach near the end that feels so pander-some; it wants you to laugh, but all the tension leaves the film with about 30 minutes to spare, so that’s all you can do anyways; also, be bummed.

The Monkey is a movie that’s so light on the horror aspect that all you can do is laugh. It’s more a comedy horror than a horror comedy, how about that... I would only relate it to a horror movie in that there is a lot of death & dying going on, something that happens most often in horror. You can tell that Perkins knew what he was trying to make here, because the tone is consistent through the movie, which already gives it a leg up on Longlegs.

As I mentioned, my mom had a copy of this short book when I was a little ass kid. I said that, remember? This is a Stephen King adaptation, and if you didn’t know that, you’d be able to figure it out pretty quickly. I haven’t read much Steve King (I read “11/22/63” years ago at the recommendation of my mom and it was really so great. I’ve read his books on writing, like “On Writing” and “Danse Macabre” which I think are great too. I read “Cell” as a teenager when it was a new release and it was horrible. I’ve read The Green Mile and The Shining. OK, I’ve read some Steve King.). I’m very aware of Steve King film adaptations, though. The Monkey starts off with a similar feel to It (the clown) and we end up with something more like Maximum Overdrive, without the AC/DC soundtrack, with a thick layer of Final Destination.

We follow a 40-year-old loser type, Hal (a man way too handsome to play the role of a weird little haunted man, but again he’s handsome, so my ass ain’t gonna complain!!!), who has been haunted by this drumming Monkey toy (“It’s not a toy” we will hear ten or so times throughout), a gift given to him and his twin brother by their estranged father (played by legend Adam Scott, a cameo we are given within the first minute of the movie, which alludes that it’s going to be more of a funny thing than a serious one). When the key to the monkey is turned, somebody dies, always graphically, and it feels completely random, Final Destination style (although there is an order in FD, I guess). They continue to lose family members until they are orphaned. We follow up 25 years later and there are themes here about something or rather (this is where the IT comparison comes in). Estranged father, childhood trauma, blah blah blah blah. There is a joke every half-minute in this thing, which really downplays any kind of theme here. This is not a dismissal, because most of it is pretty funny, otherwise it wouldn’t work. But it is pretty damn funny. You’ll have a priest at a funeral saying, “Fuck... It is what it is” next to a coffin. It's stupid, it knows what it is, and it's enjoyable once you determine that.

One thing I found funny, and I’m not sure if it was supposed to be; Hal’s aunt is killed; she falls through stairs into a box of fishing hooks, and then her face is set on fire, and then her head is impaled by a wooden post outside of her house. It’s very graphic. Hal’s brother calls him to tell him about her death. Hal goes, “Was she sick?” I just about bust a gut at that one. Very Norm Macdonald-esque.

The deaths are nasty, but it’s played out as slapstick the whole way through. It never comes as mean- spirited. Or I guess the whole thing is so mean-spirited and cynical that the deaths are all NBD in this world. Once all these deaths start happening because of that stinky little monkey (it’s key being turned by a villain, a twist we receive in the second half, an obvious one), cheerleaders show up to cheer, and silly crap like that happens. Lots of NEON films style shite, hyper reality type of stuff where everyone’s a piece of crap. As long the film is actually funny, that can be achieved. The cynicism is turned up really high, but so are the jokes. Some of it is almost like Family Guy kind of stuff. Again, I LIKED IT!

It is absolutely not scary, besides that the monkey itself is creepy to look at. What's funny is that Longlegs (god bless whoever was in charge of marketing, cause they did a great job) was being titled as the scariest movie of the decade, or century or some shit. Yet it's really no more scary than the damn scary looking little Monkey. I think there was one jump scare in this that slightly got me, but it was just a real estate lady popping up next to the side of Hal’s car. It was a joke jump scare, something I remember from the movie Horrible Bosses, for some reason.

This movie, especially with it’s 1999 setting in the first half-hour, is what Kyle Mooney’s Y2K from last year could and should have been. Of Oz Perkins, I am now somewhat of a fan. I don’t think he should stick to only Steve King short story adaptations, or even this tone. And that's not to call this movie perfect, it's far from it. There were stupid mistakes throughout, plotholes, things that happen for no reason, pointless characters that are thrown in for a 30-second gag (one side character literally steps on a rake, old school humor style; it didn't seem like a death but we never see him again, so I guess it was); it feels like a kind of cult classic in the making, which if you're trying to actively make a cult classic you probably are some kind of asshole. But I suppose if the movie is enjoyable, then that's just great. And this movie is absolutely enjoyable. I complain about the saturation of horror movies in mainstream cinema today, which furthers the belief that we're having an 80's style resurgence in culture (not my belief, somebody's though). Compared to last weeks sort of horror-comedy Companion (which achieved neiter genre), this was a fake horror classic.

2-12
Companion
I spent several days toiling over whether or not I should try getting a group of people together to see a movie on the first Regal Tuesday of February; it is an involved process. There is a quie group chat of friends that I now send messages to asking whether or not anyone wants to go, and there are several other people outside of the chat that I like to ask as well. The hard part is getting all of this done by the time I can order tickets on the Regal app, and making sure I can get a row or arrangement of seats that are all close to one another. I wanted to see Companion at 6:30 initially, but even on Monday there were like five seats in the entire theater left. I opt for a 9:20 showing, which everybody was OK with. Taylor recently become a member of Regal Unlimited, so he was able to get his own ticket. The only available seats were in the bottom two rows—the bottom-est is nightmarish seating, where you absolutely have to recline back in the chair just to get an average view of the screen that’s four feet in front of you. By the time he told me he purchased his, and by the time I got seven OK’s from people who wanted to go, seats continued to feel up. My only choice was to get three seats next to Taylor in the second row, and the four seats right in front of his (nightmare seating). Last Tuesday, we got to see Flight Risk in the far back row, my favorite. I bought everyone’s tickets and everyone sent me one via Venmo and it was all OK (we would deal with the seating later that night).

Tiff and I took the bus first to Trader Joe’s near the theater to get snacks for the movie. decided to do this before dinner because of time restraints; the showtime was for 9:20, and TJ’s closes at 9. So it would be TJ’s-Dinner-Movie. Our original idea was to go to Hamburger America, because number one it’s a pretty great cheeseburger (with a pretty modestly-priced menu for two) and number two they had one of their specials that would be ending that night. I’m not sure what the burger was, Tiff mentioned it but I don’t know what she said. It was muc too out of the way for me, though. There is another cheeseburger place that we went to once, Gotham Burger Social Club, that is pretty much across the street from Regal, so we decided to go there instead after TJ’s (at TJ’s we got some of those little bags of PB cups and chocolate almonds and gummy things and Valentine’s Day candy hearts—I love the chalkiness).

Gotham Burger is a pretty damn good smash burger place, if that’s still a thing we can openly declare. It’s a similar price to HA and it lacks the diner-cosplay vibe that that place does really well; and again, I actually really like HA, and me saying cosplay isn’t intended as any kind of dismissal, I love when we get to go there, and the specials I’ve had are all pretty exciting; Gotham has a more pub type of feel, with stickers on the walls about Willie Nelson, dark oak walls, crap like that. There was Blink 182 and like Nelly Furtado playing on the radio, which actually felt more authentic, somehow. Like the owner’s kids are working at it, and they decide what’s playing on it, because it feels old. We both got double burgas and fries and tots. It was way too much food. The burgers were so smashed they became like a skirt in the middle of the sandwich. Really good place... I swear to god Gotham was a different establishment when used to walk past it even two years ago??? And at some point I started seeing on the internet that people were raving about it, comparing it to HA and 7th Street. Seemed all psyop-y to me, but I’ll be damned, it’s pretty true. I will definitely come back, especially doubled with a movie I’m pretty sure the Champion Pizza that I used to love coming to near there closed down, so I was looking for a replacement.

We walked across the street to Regal, and met everyone there right at 9:20, showtime. Yazan showed up first, and then Taylor, and then Sid, David, and KT after, with Parker showing u right after them (he got a pancake at North Dumpling and bought Junior Mints at the theater as well—such a weird pairing).

In the theater I immediately felt bad seeing Yazan, Sid, David, and KT sitting in the row above us. Their necks looked broken trying to look at the screen from so close. Sid and Yazan moved somewhere in the back once the movie started, and David and KT braved the frontline. Tiff Parker, Taylor and I had significantly better seating by just one row behind, although it wasn’ that great either. We were seated so far to the left that sometimes in the movie Jack Quad’s eyes looked so unaligned.

Companion is one of these romantic-ish-horror-ish thriller movies that feel popular these days. It isn’t exactly fitting for one of those genres; it’s too light in tone to be a real thriller, it neve creates any kind of tension to begin calling it a horror, and it isn’t romantic, because it isn’t. It’s a movie about a guy (Jack Quaid, from the RedLetterMedia Galaxy Quest review) who brings his robot fuck doll (Sophie Thatcher, from Heretic and probably Dime’s Square) to his friend’s gigantic estate out in the woods or forest somewhere. It’s a small get-together with a few friends, and like fifteen minutes in we get a “You’re Next” style plot twist that, like all romantic- BPD-who’s-the-good-guy-and-who’s-bad type thrillers like this, turns you against th supposed nice-guy lead actor (kind of like Strange Darling from last year, although I thought that did the twist in an unexpected way).

The movie reminded me a lot of You’re Next, actually. Setting up a murder to get money from the estate of the people you’re visiting... an unexpected female hero who defends herself against the greedy a-holes (it’s expected here, for some reason, though. Like obviously it’s gonna happen!)... even the final kill of the movie was similar to You’re Next. Even a scen where they’re listening to CD’s at the party, which feels like a reach of a comparison—but it does feel ripped from a few scenes in that one. It lacks the dark cynicism and overall tone of You’re Next, though, and trades it for another incel-ish Jack Quaid bad-guy-who-is-in-denial- about-being-a-nice-guy narrative that feels like a trope at this point—which should involve a bleaker feel, I feel, but it goes for laughs pretty much the whole thing. When it isn’t going for laughs, it’s trying to get you to applaud for when something Bad happens to the Bad guy. Every movie I see has this kind of tone now. Blink Twice, for instance. It’s in this league of newer-style movies, which try to do some kind of genre-bending (yet always using “horror” as a backdrop), but you’re never scared, because you can tell by the silly quips every few minutes that obviously nothing bad is going to happen (and like Blink Twice, we will get to see our female hero leave the scene either rich or a girl boss, which to me seems... morally unsound? Like we’re supposed to be happy that Thatcher’s character has left the scene with 12 million dollars in a briefcase/s. And then we are all supposed to applaud? This 2021-Chinatown-lookin ass robot girl just killed people (but they were bad!) and now she’s running off to hide with bunch of money I guess? Maybe I’ve watched Crispin Glover talk about Back to the Future too much...).

I think Quaid & Thatcher are both good here with what they have, but the entire thing feels like something that would have been fresh in 2015. Even Quaid’s wardrobe looks like just some dude from when Obama was president. I really liked Thatcher in Heretic, which was one of the better things I saw in 2024. I liked her here too, but I didn’t really like Companion. It was fun to watch in a large group but nobody had that much good to say about it after. But it was still a good time, although I would probably see Flight Risk again before I would see this again. I feel like a guy in an Aime Leon Dore hat and a neck tat would have fun on a date with his WFH-ad- agency girlie would enjoy this type of thing, though.

2-4
Presence

Soderbergh is pretty cool, I feel like. His career started with the revolutionary Sex, Lies, and Videotape, and somewhere in the middle of it he was doing all of those Oceans movies, and then made time somewhere to make cool little films like the 2005 “Bubble” (a movie I saw las summer and really liked; shot entirely on HD video, with a soundtrack by Bob Pollard, the goat of all time). Presence is kind of like a mix of a Paranormal Activity-like plot with the mundane, sort-of-linear narrative that Bubble had. In the film, we follow a family who have moved into new home, and throughout the film there are disturbances throughout the house, clearly bein caused by another god damn ghost. The entire movie is placed through the eyes of said god damn ghost; we witness the family, throughout the course of the movie, realize that there is some kind of PRESENCE in the house. Sprinkled in is a bunch of mild family dysfunction from a voyeuristic perspective; sometimes the dad will be talking with his lawyer on the phone on the back patio, sometimes the mom (played by Lucy Liu, just great here) will be hugging her son and giving him adoration in a way that feels inappropriate to witness from such a close distance, stuff like that. There are a lot of problems within the family unit, but there is neve enough exposition to say what exactly, it gives us just enough to know it’s there, and it’s all we need. The family feels very... real. It’s kind of a ghost movie with a lot of really average family discussions at the dinner table. The editing and filming is great too. Each scene, if I recall, i filmed in one shot, and each scene cuts to black before we enter another one. Nothin revolutionary, maybe, but it felt fresh. The twist/reveal ending is a little stupid, but I also feel like Soderbergh needed to do something with it, I guess. It isn’t scary, really, but it’s one of the better movies like this I’ve seen. The trailers made it look like a boring haunted-house movie, and it kind of is that, but the way it’s put together is fun to watch. I saw the movie at 1:20 in the afternoon, and there were probably twelve people in the theater altogether. I don’t picture this one getting too much attention, but fuck it, I also don’t think this thing seemed to have a big budget, and if it did, I don’t know where the money went to. Soderbergh’s work is so all over the place, in a good way. I feel like I have to watch more of his movies, because he does so much different stuff it’s difficult for me to pinpoint a through line stylistically for his film but everything I’ve seen of his I’ve at least liked. Presence is a fun watch, I’m pleased and happy with my 50-cent convenience fee on the Regal App and the decision to spend my shitty and frigid Saturday afternoon in a place I like to think of as my second home, at this point.

1-31
Flight Risk

January is known as a slog of a month for moviegoer types. Most of the stuff that’s actually good playing during the month is often stuff that opened during Christmas season. When I first saw the trailers for Flight Risk, I was pretty sure it would be one of thos kinds of movies, the kind you see in the middle of January because there’s not else to do movie-wise, besides wait for Oscar season (the nominations this year are funny). I knew I had to see it, though.

During the early afternoon I asked a few friends via text message if they were interested in seeing it with me that evening. I hadn’t seen much this month so far, which made me feel annoyed. I have been hitting up people less to see stuff with me in general, because it create a whole curation thing through the rest of the day, where I have to figure out exactly how man tickets to buy and all that—not to mention that Regal makes you choose designated seats, which makes you have to finalize who exactly is going, otherwise you risk having to put a stra friend in a separate row. This happened during the fall when I got 14 tickets for the Joker musical. A friend last minute asked if it was OK if his girlfriend could come, and I had to explain to him the pain in the ass it would cause, and it did. It was a packed theater, and they had to consolidate into one seat just so they could stay in the same area as us. This wasn’t an issue with Flight Risk because there were probably 15 people in the entire theater.

I got the tickets earlier that day at the box office—if you do this rather th purchasing via the app, you can remove the $1.50 “convenience fee” entirely, making all the tickets 8 dollars instead of closer to 10. Not that it matters that much, because all of my friends are good about sending me money, so I don’t have to eat any kind of cost, plus my ticket is no money. But it’s a thing anyways.

I walked to Delancey Regal with Tiff. We met Yazan, David, and David’s gf KT They were upstairs waiting for me to gift them their paper tickets. I was excited to see them because it’s great to be in the presence of good friends. The showtime was at 9:20, and me and Tiff walked in the doors at 9:15. I had to spend several minutes getting one ticket refunde due to another friend who backed out of the movie last minute. The manager gave me a free movie ticket for the next time I attend a movie, which is cool with me.

Flight Risk is an action thriller type thing directed by the wild Mel Gibson, taking place entirely in a private plane. Mark Wahlberg and his haircut plays a hired criminal type who is hired to kill Topher Grace’s character, Winston, a pussy ass little dude, who is being taken by Michelle Dockery’s character, a cop-type lady. Winston got captured by her in Alaska for doing shady criminal type stuff, and he immediately tells on his criminal type higher ups, so they hop on a plane to get to New York so he can tell on them in a more official kind way. But Mark Wahlberg as I said is a criminal type, so he is there as the pilot and also as their killer. The whole reveal happens within the first twenty minutes of the movie. The middle of the movie is some on-flight fighting between the three (mostly Dockery and Wahlberg) with Top Grace pretty much playing the same character as he does in That 70’s Show, cracking ridiculously light jokes (“I’d rather fly Spirit!”). There’s such a heavy amount of "funny stuff" that it makes me hesitate to call it an action thriller; much of the supposed-to-be funny stuff isn’t that funny, and a lot of the tense stuff is what made the audience laugh. So maybe Gibson’s purpose here is for the whole thing to be funny, which I guess it is. A lot of what we see is Dockery having to learn how to fly the plane due to incapacitating Wahlberg (his name we never find out; we definitely find out Dockery’s character’s name but I don’t remember. A lot of that reminds me of the Top Gun episode of the Angry Video Game Nerd, which is cool. There isn’t a lot happening for the second act, lots of scenic plane-flying-through-Alaska scenes, with small hints of tension and action, but nothing that warrants much of an R-rating, besides Wahlberg threatening rape to poor Topher Grace, and one kinda gross and cool scene of Wahlberg breaking out of his handcuffs. We get small hints of backstories with our two heroes but you really don’t find much reason to sympathize with Grace, because he spend much of the time being intentionally so annoying. The ETA for the flight gets brought up a lot of the movie (“We have 75 minutes left” “15 minutes until land”) and it seems like 4th wall breaking, like they’re telling the audience how much time of the actual movie is left. There is a really silly love/flirtation side-plot between Dockery and a pilot that is helping them navigat their safe landing via radio signals. Their landing the plane and in general the final fift minutes or so of the movie are just awesome. At this point in it you know that it isn’t that serious of a movie, and you can only enjoy the craziness with your friends. The small audience was having a great time once they realized what they had gotten into; like we all collectively decided we are stupid as shit for wanting to see this, but we get a final act that we deserve fo sitting through Topher’s constant mugging and Wahlberg’s rapey crap (he is awesome in this). When the credits appeared on the screen, the crowd clapped and cheered. Everyone leaving the movie seemed happy. I was definitely in a silly mood after watching it. I can’t in good fait say it’s the best movie I’ve seen at Regal this year so far (although I probably would watch it again over Nosf), but I recommend seeing it in theaters, because it’s a fun watch with people. It’s absolutely not Gibson’s best work, either, and I have no idea why he made this (the one- location type of thing and sparse cast just feels like something that would have been filmed i 2020 or something) but I guess I’m grateful that he did.

1-28
Nosferatu

The cold grip of January can make a fellow quite mad... I feel that’s how they would say that in this movie. But it remains true! I have been suffering as a byproduct of the cold. I get bored of the winter naysayers, people who you feel like are always saying “I get so depressed in January” I get it. Get the hell over it! I was feeling that though on this particular Saturday. I’ve learned that a good fix for it is to walk my ass to the Regal on Delancey and catch a movie. There’s actually quite a bit out at the moment that I want to see—Tiff didn’t seem all that interested in Nosferatu so I figured, OK, I can see that one myself.

I booked a 2:20 showtime. I stopped in the Essex market, which at one point I was accidentally calling it the “Regal market” which became the “Regal Mall” which I still think it should be renamed to. I got a Celsius from a store inside as my movie snack, for some reason. I had a Monster on my mind but I didn’t see one immediately, so I got some kind of apple- flavored Celsius.

I sat in the theater at 2:21–I got to sit in my favorite seat, the very top-left corner—either that or the top-right but only the top-left was available for this showtime—actually quite a packed theater for a 2:20 show—and the trailers started at 2:25. There was a couple that were sitting directly next to me, although there were five or so seats to the left of them that were vacant. Around fifteen minutes into the movie, they shifted to the further-down ones, and I was happy for that. Those kinds of gestures of privacy are so meaningful to me. Not that the movies are private, per se, but... I’ve been in a theater before that’s probably at 20 percent occupancy and for some reason a guy or some guys decide to sit directly next to me, even though there’s rows of seats open. Like, why? Maybe this is a “me” thing.

The trailers rolled from 2:25 to 2:40, which is really not so bad for a Regal. Although— and I’m a huge fan of Pepsi products BTW—the pre-trailer commercials are always in this order: A Pepsi ad, a Mountain Dew ad, and then a Starry (!?!?!) ad. Can’t Pepsi just hire their in- house people to consolidate it all into one commercial? I do need to try a Starry though.

Another thing about modern-day trailers I want to speak on: There is always a constant editing trend throughout any string of trailers. I started noticing this during the Obama era. In 2012, every trailer would have a medley of what we called back then “Transformers sounds”- machine-like, dubstep-y buzzing. In the first Trump era and some of Biden’s, we got the tinnitus craze, which, halfway through every trailer, a high-pitched tinnitus-style would ring, muting any sounds or other dialogue happening. In the last few years, every trailer seems to feature a female-fronted cover of a classic song... Kind of like how Donnie Darko had that famous cover of that Depeche Mode song. That’s for your more A24-style movies. For action movies, they’re edited like a skate video or something. Every gun shot and kick to the face is edited perfectly to the song. It’s not bad, it even makes sense, but when you see it for every Den of Thieves style film, it gets tiring. One trend in trailers that absolutely is not around anymore is the 3rd-person voiceover. Very 80’s/90’s style... “In a world...” Wonder when this will come back in style.

About Nosferatu—I liked. I don’t know much about the original property. I’m a millennial, so I know who Nosferatu is because of the Hash-Slinging Slasher episode of SpongeBob. I liked Nic Hoult, again. I’ve seen him starring in three different major motion pictures over the last few months, and I’ve liked him in all of them. I like Depp, who I only know from Yoga Hosiers, which is one of the worst movies I’ve ever partially seen. Her role in this reminded me of 1999’s Sleepy Hollow, starring her dad, Johnny. I found myself thinking about Sleepy Hollow several times during this movie—and not just because there are children killed in both (just kidding, that’s pretty much only why). There are cool scenes that stand out to me, most of them with Hoult, honestly. The violence is good enough for an R, and the last thirty minutes are good. There’s some slow moments and the tension is all over the place—I think a huge reason for this is how much we see Nosferatu himself. And Bill Skarzg. plays Nosf awesomely in it (how accurate to the old one, I have no idea) but we see so much of him that I feel like it loses a lot of the dread that you’re supposed to feel when you have a horror villain. There’s a shadow play scene that is from the 1920’s film (again I haven’t seen it but I know enough about it’s iconography to know—even if you didn’t know that I you can tell director Eggers is basically telling you, look, dickheads, it’s like the old movie). There’s a lot of funny old speak in here which mostly feels unintentionally funny but I do think that they have Dafoe saying some things that are supposed to be funny (he is good in it too—I feel like he’s in so much stuff lately and I could see myself growing annoyed by this in a matter of months but for now I’ve enjoyed his presence). The audience laughed at stuff that I don’t think was supposed to be funny—there is a scene when we first meet Nosf and there is a moment of silence and he says what sounds like just the word “Yeet...” Someone laughed at this which caused a larger laughter throughout the crowd. Also the fact that they’re German but all have British-style accents... Anyhow. There is a certain dread just in the tone of the film that I like, and it did remind of me of how I felt about Sleepy Hollow in a way. Living in that time probably was as depressing as depicted, I’m sure. There’s nary a happy moment in the whole thing, is one way to put it. The consensus on it seems to be... Well there doesn’t seem to be one. You either like it, or hate it, or neither of those. I say- it’s good, but I don’t care if you see it or not. I left the movie kind of in bad spirits; not because the movie was bad, but rather, it just has that kind of tone to it. It isn’t fun, but it’s chilling (and this will be the first and only time I ever call something that).

I left the theater around 4:50, feeling somewhat better than I had when I first decided to see a movie. Hopefully next time I will have enough redeemable Regal redeemable Regal points to purchase a Starry on tap.

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A Complete Unknown

Biographical thing about the rise of Bobby D. Thought it would be written over a larger timeline but it stays within the frame of folk music up until 1965; I don't know much about his story so I thought it was a nice lil' biopic about not entirely just Dylan himself but moreso about his relationship and succession (and success) from the folk music scene, specifically from his move to NYC up until the release of Highway 61 Revisited. For the last decade I haven't had much of an opinion about T. Chalamet but lately I've been getting a lot of videos on Tiktok about how he likes college sports and shit so I've been growing to like him, which is pretty much what sparked my interest in the movie. That, and that there is one brief scene that is filmed at White Manna Hamburgers in NJ; Tiff and I went here a month or two ago and there were posters on the wall about filming taking place there, so I thought, Hell, now I gotta see this movie. It's good, btw (the movie, I mean, but the hamburger place is recommended also). It doesn't step out of the boundaries of these kinds of musician memoir things, but it does it's job. T. is good as Bob Dylan, I think. Maybe a bigger Dylan fan than me would disagree, but I thought he was great. A quarter of his dialogue is mumbl-y crap that probably wouldn't be transcribed properly via closed captioning, which is unintentially-intentionally funny, probably some of the funnier stuff in the movie, and close to accurate to the stuff I've heard of Bob's at whatever ceremony he's attended that I happened to watch on Youtube. Norm Macdonald has some funny bits about him (he was a huge fan) so I had to look them up - Bob's a funny MF and I don't know if he knows it or not.

Supporting cast is great too, Edward Norton as Pete Seeger, whoever plays Joan Baez is good at playing Joan Baez - there's some will-they-won't they stuff that's fun to watch unfold if you don't know the story - I don't by the way - I can't be judge on whether a lot of the stuff that unfolds is accurate or not; like, I really doubt his manager actually punched Alan Lomax at a folk festival (upon a quick search, turns out he actually did. so yes, I cannot be a judge on this stuff). One thing I liked is the way they did up NYC in early-60's fashion - a better job with 20th-century NYC than Joker 2. There's little scenes to showcase how the times were('a) changing; JFK coverage on the TV, Bob playing a show at DC, stuff like that. It doesn't get too into this stuff, only using it to further the timeline (which only seems to happen in 1961 and 1965). It's mostly about the music stuff and it's cool to get a glimpse into the struggling folk scene, and Dylan's resistance to it; he has a few lines that are either verbatim or paraphrasing something like "200 people in there want me to be somebody I'm not." It could come off as corny but I kind of liked that stuff. He seems cool to me.

It doesn't stray from portraying him as an asshole, though, either. It shows that pretty clearly in the trailer too ("You're kind of an asshole, Bob" - Baez) but that was part of the draw for me as well. He's an original dickhead with a lot of imitators, both musically and attitude-ly. But, at least in reference to the movie, he seemed to be only about the music... Kind of like how Tom Cruise only cares about the Law in the movie The Firm.

I also like the stuff with Johnny Cash, played by Boyd Holbrook. I didn't really know they were friends like that but they are played as two stupid yet funny guys when they're together or as pen pals. Going into the movie I thought there would be some kind of corruption-of-Bob-Dylan kind of plot, but there isn't anything of the sort, really. Mostly everyone Bob kicks it with seem like they just annoy him, minus I guess Woody Guthrie, who is in a mental hospital in New Jersey, and Bob pays him visits throughout the film to play him music, which is nice. But again, everyone else just pisses him off mostly, and it's funny to see him walk off stage in a scene because he doesn't want to play a song he was playing like three years prior. Pure asshole behavior, but also... I think it's cool.

There's a scene towards the beginning where it is revealed to the audience that Bob has been lying about having been in a traveling circus (instead it turns out that he is actually Jewish); it never gets brought up again and I suppose the only thing we are supposed to take from it is the classic coming-to-NYC story for any rich kid pretending to be poor.

I recommend it, it's a cute little movie about a pretty cool asshole. It was a Regal Tuesday, so I was able to take the lady there for cheap. We met there a little before 7 (showtime @ 7:10). She brought a cheeseburger from 7th St and I brought some peanut butter cups and licorice from Trader Joe's down the street. I also got us a small popcorn (had enough points with my Regal acct that I was able to get it for free). We had a good time at what was probably a half-filled theater. We will definitely be attending the sequel. I want to know just exactly how the Traveling Wilburys started.

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