Update on Site

Due to health issues and upcoming surgery, I have not added new reviews recently. I hope to start again in 2024, but for now I'm taking a break.

This Film is Not Yet Rated (2006)

★★
The Motion Picture Association of America (M.P.A.A.)* has long been a thorn in the side of film critics, fans and independent filmmakers for decades. Its mission is to offer a voluntary rating system to help parents determine whether a movie is suitable for their children to watch. The organization sees itself as a guide to help with these decisions, but from the outside, the organization is a censorship arm of the big studios and theater owners that applies different standards to mainstream releases and smaller productions. Screeners for the M.P.A.A. view similar content in movies and grade them inconsistently, so that an oral sex scene in one movie (Single White Female) will appear in an R-rated production while a similar scene in Boys Don't Cry between women will contribute to an NC-17 rating. Kirby Dick's documentary This Film is Not Yet Rated explores this curious process by attempting to uncover who these screeners are and who backs them.

Freaky (2020)

½ star
Freaky is so bad it makes me want to watch The Hot Chick all over again even though I didn't care for Rob Schneider's lame body switching movie. Just when this genre has seemingly run its course, along comes another filmmaker who thinks he can revive it. The guilty party this time is Christopher Landon, the writer/director of the decent Happy Death Day series. His attempt to meld the body switching movie with horror and comedy is a disaster. More than that, it's pitiful. The opening kills were badly staged and completely unfunny, and it's all downhill from there. The plot involves an ancient dagger that can cause the attacker and victim to switch bodies. Landon's stab at the concept involves switching members of the opposite sex, an idea that has been explored only a handful of times, but I've never really seen a movie mine this scenario to its fullest potential. The one that I think did it the best was 2006's It's a Boy Girl Thing. I already mentioned Rob Schneider's middling comedy, which focused too much on Rachel McAdams in Schneider's body and not the other way around.

Whiplash (2014)

★★
Whiplash is a great film and does everything right until it is nearly over. It makes a fatal error at the 11th hour and completely upends everything that came before. That is a shame, because there is so much to like about writer/director Damien Chazelle's searing drama of musical mayhem. The acting is phenomenal. The dialogue is sometimes over the top in a way that was pleasing to my ears. The jazz numbers come at you like they were fired out of a cannon. This is a gripping and powerful movie up until the moment Chazelle changes the dynamic between student and teacher. Instead of a hero who defeats his archenemy, we get a hero who validates his archenemy's methods. I don't know if Chazelle meant to do that or if he just completely lost track of his set up and its logical payoff. I don't regret seeing this. I'm almost tempted to recommend it to everyone in my orbit. The movie's high audience and critic scores on Rotten Tomatoes are not lost on me. I wonder why so few saw what I saw.

Mission: Impossible Ghost Protocol (2011)

★★★½
Brad Bird's hiring as the director of Mission: Impossible Ghost Protocol signified a massive leap forward for the franchise. The previous installments were all solid entries in a series trending upward, but the fourth movie is a spectacular showcase of stunts and intricate plotting on a whole new level. Everything is bigger and better this time around. Tom Cruise returns as Ethan Hunt and looks completely at home as he's dangling outside the Burj Khalifa in Dubai. (I've been to Dubai. The building is a towering monster that casts a giant shadow over everything.) Bird so masterfully orchestrates the action and storytelling that he looks like he's been directing live-action for years, even though this is his first such project after his animated efforts The Iron Giant and The Incredibles. Whatever hunch Tom Cruise and producer J.J. Abrams had about Bird paid off.