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.

The Pope's Exorcist (2023)

★
The Pope's Exorcist is a clunky and unimpressive exorcism movie that looks good but does nothing new in its presentation of a possessed child who speaks with a gravelly voice. I grew impatient as every minute passed. I started thinking of better movies in this genre, and if that's what I'm doing in the first 20 minutes, then that is because this movie kept falling short of even the most modest of expectations. It features frights, screeches, levitations, superhuman strength and even necks that twist around. If Linda Blair watched this, she couldn't be faulted if she stood up proud and took a bow before everyone around her and declared that she did it better. Even the puke scene was derivative, although it wasn't pea soup this time but blood. I suppose director Julius Avery had to draw the line somewhere with the nods to 1973's The Exorcist, but the inclusion of ghostly writing on a child's belly makes me wonder if anyone—anyone—during preproduction meetings asked if there were too many similarities with William Friedkin's iconic horror show. There's even a freakin' spider walk.

Natasha (2007)

★
There is a good idea buried in this mess of a movie, which is directed with incompetence and scored like a lurid soap opera. It's equal parts Russian gangster movie and erotic thriller, but their convergence is a sloppy concoction to such an extent that both elements suffer. Scenes were left in that should have been reshot, while the budget confined the action to such an extent that a family greets a Russian foreign exchange student at a train station in an English village instead of a major airport in London because shooting at Heathrow would have been more expensive, therefore expecting a teenager who speaks broken English to know how to get off a plane, take the tube and eventually hop on a train to the countryside without getting lost. Natasha is bottom-of-the-barrel entertainment.

Jules (2023)

★★★½
When I read the premise for Jules, I imagined a fictionalized version of the story of a supposed U.F.O. that crashed in Kecksburg, Pennsylvania in 1965. I learned of the incident in a 1990 episode of Unsolved Mysteries, which I watched while growing up in Southwestern Pennsylvania, and it was kind of cool to see that such an event occurred in our part of the state. Maybe writer Gavin Steckler set his story for Jules in a fictional Western PA community (Boonton) because of the Kecksburg incident. As I watched the movie, I quickly realized that this was not a story of cover ups and mysterious government agents in radiation suits who take over a town and silence everyone under threat of violence. Instead, this is a surprisingly gentle tale that examines the difficulties of old age and its effects on the family. At one point I began to search for parallels with Ron Howard's Cocoon, but there were none. This is its own story, and director Marc Turtletaub tells it beautifully.

Pee-wee's Big Adventure (1985)

★★★½
I don't remember when exactly I watched Pee-wee's Big Adventure for the first time. It was on H.B.O. a year or two after the 1985 theatrical release, which came and went unnoticed for me. I did watch his H.B.O. special The Pee-wee Herman Show beforehand, so I was familiar with the character. The adult humor went over my head (Jambi upon receiving hands: "I've had something I've wanted to do for a long time"), but I was struck by the imaginative set design, quirky humor and colorful characters. Growing up, I envisioned Pee-wee Herman as children's entertainment, but his appeal never wavered upon adulthood. Pee-wee's longevity speaks to the child in all of us or a part of us that is tethered to more innocent times. Children love the bright colors and goofy antics, but adults can appreciate the surreal humor and artistic merit of Pee-wee's world. The actor who created the character, Paul Reubens, worked tirelessly for years to maintain the aura of this innocent man-child with an undefinable age. He gave interviews in character. The mystery was part of the presentation.

Mission: Impossible III (2006)

★★★
Mission: Impossible III tries to shake up the formula and try something different. We get the truest MacGuffin of the series, a heist no one sees and a villain whose plan for world conquest is never revealed. What the movie does instead is put together a solid team of I.M.F. agents to carry out the mission and feature an operation in Vatican City that is as elaborate as any similar sequence in the franchise. We also have the added difficulty of Ethan Hunt's relationship with series newcomer Julia Meade (Michelle Monaghan), which figures into a frantic chase spurred by Ethan's realization that his nemesis intends to do exactly what he said he would do. Director J.J. Abrams is on deck for his take on Ethan's world. At the time (2006), he was known for his television shows Alias and Lost. I never watched the former, though I have been through the latter several times. I suspect there is a bit more of Alias here given that show's premise, but Abrams' most evident contribution is his preference to get straight to the point, which differs from Brian De Palma's slow burn approach and John Woo's stylistic flair.

Sugar Cane Alley (1983)

★★★½
José (Garry Cadenat) lives a hard life in the sugar cane fields of 1930s Martinique. He is an orphan being raised by his grandmother. His childhood is only a brief respite before he is strong enough to work in the fields for the rest of his life to make a paltry sum that will barely sustain him. His prospects don't appear too bright. We see that in the early scenes. Slavery is officially illegal on these Caribbean islands, but the workers toil away as if they were still chained to an existence imposed on their ancestors. The workers are free, but they are free to do what? They have no resources to move out of the shacks to learn new skills. Slavery is still in the recent past, but maybe someone like José represents the future. He's a smart kid. He is resourceful. He sits and listens to the wise Medouze (Douta Seck) tell stories of Africa. He wants to travel there one day.

Mission: Impossible 2 (2000)

★★★
Mission: Impossible 2 is a glorious marriage of Hollywood action and John Woo's heroic bloodshed style from Hong Kong. Producers Tom Cruise and Paula Wagner hit the jackpot in recruiting the legendary director, who was hot off the success of Face/Off and looking for his next big challenge. He found it with the second installment in the blockbuster series. Working from a solid script by Robert Towne and a game Tom Cruise who was up for anything, Woo crafted this splendid thriller with secret agents, heists, disguises, deception and some of the most visually arresting action scenes in the director's oeuvre. Lest this appear as a movie focused solely on its style and sacrificing substance, rest assured that that is not the case. The plot is engaging in its own right, and the chemistry between Cruise and costar Thandie Newton is a highlight of the show. There are the quieter moments that remind us of Brian De Palma's Mission: Impossible, and then there are amped up shootouts and chases that unmistakably have Woo's fingerprints all over them.

Mission: Impossible (1996)

★★★
The first installment in what would later become an action series of consistently strong output, 1996's Mission: Impossible introduces us to Tom Cruise's Ethan Hunt and lays the groundwork for a succession of assignments that will take Hunt all over the world to stop supervillains with mind-blowing plans for world domination. Each new entry raises the stakes. The Navy SEALs have a saying: "The only easy day was yesterday." In Hunt's world, the only easy job was the previous one. James Bond had his SPECTRE and the threat of nuclear war, but his next mission could feature a villain with modest goals, like Kananga's drug operation in Live and Let Die. The Bond films of that era could be cranked out every year because of the plentiful source material. The longer wait times between Mission: Impossible films give the writers more time to craft stories that pit Ethan Hunt against ever-increasing threats. It is no small accomplishment that the series writers keep outdoing themselves.

Vanity Fair (2004)

★★
Many lengthy novels suffer during the transition to the big screen because the filmmakers delete excess characters and shorten the plot to facilitate a reasonable running time. Vanity Fair makes a strong case that deletion is sometimes necessary. This is a film with so many characters and personal stories that it becomes overwhelming at 137 minutes, a time that doesn't pass with any noticeable speed. The movie features good acting, the costumes look authentic, and the architecture seems realistic enough, but there doesn't seem to be any drive to its story. It's basically one scene after another of sophisticated British characters and their mundane problems associated with their social status.

Baby's Day Out (1994)

zero stars
Despite his '90s output, John Hughes will forever remain one of my favorite screenwriters. The guy knew how to write great dialogue. He viewed his teenage characters as complex individuals with strengths and weaknesses, dreams and insecurities. What happened? How did he go from Sixteen Candles to this? Baby's Day Out (1994) is his worst movie. Though he wasn't the director, he still wrote it and produced it, which meant he had enough input to take much of the blame for its failures. There is not a single redeemable aspect of the finished product. I didn't buy the premise. The characters are stupid. The soundtrack grates all the way to the bitter end. The special effects are substandard, which might be okay if the movie were any good as a live-action cartoon, but it isn't. The direction is appalling, though I'll give director Patrick Read Johnson a pass because he made Angus the following year. No, this is a John Hughes film, and its existence represents a low point in the revered writer's catalogue. His gifts to Gen X teens and children are still held in high esteem. Baby's Day Out is that lump of coal that accidentally fell into the stocking.

Sound of Freedom (2023)

★★★½
Finished in 2018 and shelved by Disney after its acquisition of Fox, Sound of Freedom finally makes it way to theaters five years later. The movie's journey to the big screen comes to us by way of producer Eduardo Verastegui's tireless efforts to pry the distribution rights from Disney's clutches and raise funds through grassroots efforts to get this story in front of audiences. I’m glad all the hard work paid off. This movie was too important to remain hidden away in a vault somewhere collecting dust. It tells the true story of Tim Ballard, played passionately here by Jim Caviezel, as a former agent of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security who found the limitations of his employer's jurisdiction insufficient for him to make enough of a difference. Early on, he and a colleague comment on the number of pedophiles they have arrested. It's a high number, but the number of children they have rescued is far too few. Dissatisfied with the bureaucratic obstacles in his path, Ballard eventually struck out on his own and founded an organization that aims to rescue children and raise awareness of the sickening crime of child trafficking.

Hush (2008)

★★½
Hush (2008) is a taut little thriller taking place on a rainy night. It has a small cast and makes use of only a few locations. Like Duel's menacing truck driver, we have a villain here who drives a truck and remains largely unseen. I came across the trailer on a D.V.D. while I was watching another movie, and the concept intrigued me. Along a U.K. motorway, Zakes (William Ash) and girlfriend Beth (Christine Bottomley) tail a white cargo truck, the back door for which opens by accident and reveals a woman locked in a cage. That was enough for me. Movies with simple premises like this depend on imagination and clever plotting to make up for the lack of characters and settings, so seeing a movie like this succeed in achieving its objectives is very satisfying. There are hits and misses, to be sure, but the good ones, like the misunderstood Open Water, are treasures that are worth the trip to uncover.

Battlefield Earth (2000)

★★½
Early in Battlefield Earth, the hero Jonnie Goodboy Tyler (Barry Pepper) thinks he's come across a monster and swings at it with a weapon he finds nearby. When he has a moment to get his bearings, he sees that it was only a lifeless structure. We recognize it as a dragon or dinosaur statue from a mini golf course, and his weapon was a golf club. Jonnie meets two hunters, who inform him of a great city nearby where the gods were frozen in their place during a conflict long ago. The hunters take Jonnie to the city to show him. They find one frozen god, who is just a stone statue. They go inside a building, where Jonnie sees more frozen gods and observes that they must have really angered someone to bring this horrible fate upon them. They are department store mannequins. This is not supposed to be a comedy, but the movie was trending in that direction. I realized this in the first 10 minutes, but I kept holding out hope that the script would settle down and deliver the serious science fiction action movie that the trailers promised. That never happened; the movie kept defying my expectations. Eventually I just gave in and enjoyed what I was watching because it was making me laugh. I saw this in the theater on its premiere weekend. I couldn't gauge the audience's reaction to this, but I'm certain everyone around me could gauge mine.

Ace Ventura: Pet Detective (1994)

★
The character of Ace Ventura behaves like a feral cat brought indoors for the first time. He runs around the room maniacally and expends a great deal of energy running around but going nowhere. Unlike a rescued feral cat, Ace Ventura remains forever untamed. That is to the movie's detriment. Like most viewers in 1994, I saw Ace Ventura: Pet Detective after having watched Jim Carrey's hilarious performances on In Living Color, where he was spot-on with his impersonations (Pee-wee Herman, Vanilla Ice) and original characters like Fire Marshall Bill. His schtick was perfect for a sketch television show, but his boundless enthusiasm unleashed on the big screen resulted in this vapid mystery movie with little going for it. At the time of this movie's release, I was only vaguely aware of box office totals as a measuring stick for success. After Ace Ventura became a huge hit, and after I saw it for the first time with its box office haul in mind, I realized that quality has nothing to do with how much money a movie makes.

Career Opportunities (1991)

★★
At some point at the end of the '80s, possibly beginning with Uncle Buck, John Hughes began a devastating slide into mediocrity. Maybe by then he had spread himself too thin. He was a prolific screenwriter during that decade, often directing the stories that came straight from his heart while allowing others to direct scripts that were less personal. Even though in the '90s he wrote some good movies like Home Alone and Curly Sue, he nonetheless embarked on a mysterious foray into kiddie fare, and the results included Dennis the Menace and Flubber.

The Air Up There (1994)

★★
The Air Up There could have gone several different ways, and even though the story didn't quite go as I had expected, it still ended up with the Big Game at the End. Sports comedies in the '90s were a lucrative if creatively lacking genre. The formula often involved casting a recognizable actor and putting him in charge of a scrappy and inexperienced team that emerges as the victorious underdog. Emilio Estevez, Rodney Dangerfield, Rick Moranis, Whoopi Goldberg and Halle Berry (I'm counting Race the Sun too) took turns leading their teams to varying levels of success, and Kevin Bacon got his chance to play a coach who assembles a team to play against the intimidating and well-funded foe. These movies grew tiresome as the decade went on, and The Air Up There is no exception, though it does tinker with the mechanics of the outline made familiar by others and delivers a few unexpected detours.

Skyscraper (2018)

★★½
Like The Towering Inferno but without the crowded room of famous actors, Skyscraper does what you would expect it to do given the premise of a burning high rise and the presence of Dwayne Johnson. It's the kind of movie Sylvester Stallone would have made if this idea had been brought to him in the '80s. With a building falling apart around him and hindered by animated fire that is far from being perfected, Johnson barrels through the action with his signature gruffy tough-guy personality, but this time he has family placed at risk, which gives him the opportunity to show a softer side that works and is a welcome change of pace for the actor. A few surprises here and there keep the interest level high. For once, a Dwayne Johnson character is vulnerable and could fail. Late in the movie he realizes he no longer controls his destiny, and this results in a tender moment with his daughter to assure her of his love for her. The rest of the movie, though, feels like a retread of better action movies.

Growing Up with I Spit on Your Grave (2019)

★★★
Terry Zarchi's mistitled Growing Up with I Spit on Your Grave (more on that later) expands upon previous examinations of Meir Zarchi's cult classic that appeared on D.V.D. releases and presents an informative behind-the-scenes look at the infamous shocker from 1978. He brings together a wide array of commentators and cast members to discuss how the movie came together, the experience of filming its notorious rape scenes and the Streisand Effect that the negative reviews had on home video sales. Star Camille Keaton has spoken frequently on her involvement and her belief in the project, but the younger Zarchi goes one step further by obtaining interviews with actors Eron Tabor and Gunter Kleemann, who both explain how they got their roles and go over what they thought of the content when they read the script. Crew members and film critics chime in, but Zarchi's use of social media to recruit commentators both for and against the movie is a level of fan outreach that I've never seen before.

The Super Mario Bros. Movie (2023)

★★★
The Super Mario Bros. Movie is a fun animated adventure full of colorful landscapes and amusing characters. It has a simple plot, but it makes the most of its short runtime by inserting many references to its source material and various other adaptations over the years. I really liked the commercial jingle taken straight from the television series starring Captain Lou Albano as Mario from the late '80s. The movie is also a referendum on the modern state of film criticism and the D.E.I. culture that has become widely vocal over the last six years. I don't wish to position Illumination's latest success story in the culture war, but its attackers have forced the issue. The movie has no motivation behind it other than to entertain. Children will love it for its beautiful character design and humorous situations. It is thrilling in all the ways that will captivate its young fans. Adults who are long-time devotees of the games—along with those who are not, this is not a movie that excludes curious outsiders—will appreciate the attention to detail and the respect given to Nintendo's mascot. This is a passion project. Nevertheless, leave it to the race hustlers to attack it for not fitting into their agenda.

Searching (2018)

★★★
Searching (2018) is a thriller that takes place entirely on a computer monitor. It is not the first of its kind—Unfriended came out in 2014, and that wasn't even the first—but it is a superior example of a genre on the rise. The potential for storytelling in the so-called screenlife format has yet to be fully tapped, but these early examples prove that the sky's the limit, or in this case, the internet's the limit. Here is a film that ingeniously uses websites, software, applications and cameras to tell the tale. Not only that, but the movie even conveys emotion through mouse clicks and keyboard entry actions. When a character hesitates, this act manifests not through facial gestures but through a cursor and the backspace key. Watching this movie was a thrill.

Irreversible (2003)

★★★
Director Gaspar Noé did not endear himself to me with his earlier effort I Stand Alone, which featured a character so hateful that he surpassed analysis. He was simply a man who hated the world and expressed it with a never-ending narration filled with obscenities and insults. His follow-up Irréversible is more focused. It has something to say about the characters in the story. It has a unique narrative structure that reveals how rage can overcome even the most peaceful of men. The movie opens with the end credits scrolling in reverse (downward). The credits then tilt as if reacting to what the next hour will bring. They eventually spiral out of control. Noé's name appears last, and there is a pause. He really wants you to know who made this. After a brief visit with I Stand Alone's butcher (very likely), played once again by Philippe Nahon, we get plunged into a chaotic scene in which a desperate and infuriated Marcus (Vincent Cassel) goes on a rampage in a homosexual B.D.S.M. club looking for La Tenia for reasons to be made clear later.

Ghost World (2001)

★★★★
Enid (Thora Birch) sits in the front row at her high school graduation. Decked out in her cap and gown, she watches as a classmate in a wheelchair and back brace gives a speech describing high school as the training wheels for the bicycle of real life. A trio of rappers in full '90s apparel (still in style in 2001) runs out on stage to entertain the class and audience. Enid is not amused. Her friend Rebecca (Scarlett Johansson) is equally unimpressed. After the ceremony, the two run out of the auditorium and stomp on their caps. That's what they think of their high school years. What do characters like this do afterwards? This is the story of Enid and Rebecca and that phase of their life when the future is uncertain. Based on the comic book by Daniel Clowes and directed by Terry Zwigoff, Ghost World is a funny and touching story taking place during that uncertain time when someone is old enough to start thinking about the future but too young to commit to anything.

Lionheart (1991)

★★½
Growing up, I was a big fan of Jean-Claude Van Damme. He came across as a ripped version of Chuck Norris with the added ability to perform gravity-defying moves along with his signature splits. At the risk of running afoul of Norris, whose accomplishments have been documented in a convenient and inexhaustible list of facts, I would go so far as to declare Van Damme's movies as superior in terms of their variety. Norris always had the no-nonsense approach, while fellow European Arnold Schwarzenegger brought his muscular frame to his action movies. Van Damme was the best of both worlds. He was tough, but could soften up when the situation arose. He also had a magnificent physique. His punches and kicks looked like there was plenty of raw power behind them. His drug habit and waning audience interest in martial arts movies sent his career into the direct-to-video market. For a time, though, his movies were a yearly expectation in theaters, and Lionheart was one of his most polished movies.

The Doom Generation (1995)

★★
The Doom Generation is the kind of movie that works best (if it can be argued that it works at all) when watched in the middle of the night. That was when I first saw it. I got off the late shift one night in 1997 and turned on H.B.O., and there it was. I watched it again recently late at night prior to writing these words. The lack of ambient noise heightens the movie's nuances. Most of the scenes take place in the eerie dark landscape of Los Angeles. The city's most recognizable spots are nowhere to be seen. The characters are the worst that Generation X has to offer. They slither out when everyone else has retired for the evening. They barely go out during the day. When they do, director Gregg Araki is eager for the sun to go down again. His trio of losers occupies a society seemingly on the edge of disaster, like the pseudo-civilization seen in Mad Max before Max's journey into the wasteland. Araki, a baby boomer, apparently had little confidence that Gen X could succeed. As the middle entry of his Teen Apocalypse Trilogy, The Doom Generation is the worst-case scenario for a demographic raised on sugar and empty calories and with a reputation for being called slacker and disaffected. His kids are violent, overly sexualized, contemptible and unintelligent.

200 Cigarettes (1999)

★½
Movies with lots of dialogue can be great if the characters have something interesting to say. When they talk simply to talk because the writer didn't know when they should stop, then you get the endless banter of 200 Cigarettes, which is a wildly uneven tale featuring smokers, yuppies and partyers all mulling around on New Year's Eve 1981 before attending a bash in New York City's East Village to say farewell to the year and give 1982 a big welcome. The crowded cast is, I think, a cover for a screenplay with no idea how to use dialogue to create a sustained narrative and hold our interest. 1995's Before Sunrise was simply about two people (Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy) who meet on a train and decide to tour Vienna while discussing their hopes, dreams and expectations for life. Their conversations stemmed from a desire for human connection and diverged into other topics naturally.

Geostorm (2017)

★½
Geostorm is Dean Devlin taking a stab at directing a disaster movie after years of producing Roland Emmerich's projects. He was very capable at that job, delivering profitable movies without the production headaches of something like Waterworld. If his debut film in the director's chair is any indication, Devlin's strengths truly lie in producing. The possibility exists that he could make a better movie down the road, but I never spotted anything here that demonstrated that he learned anything from his business partner in terms of storytelling and presentation. Maybe he figured that he could just go with what works because it worked before and brought in the money. Whatever his thinking, Geostorm is a tepid sci-fi disaster movie that isn't a complete disaster on its own, but it shows that Devlin has a ways to go if he wants to match the excitement of Emmerich's The Day After Tomorrow.

Devotion (2022)

★★★
The U.S. military has long had non-white members in its ranks, though they were not initially seen as equals. It took people like Ensign Jesse Brown to break the color barrier and prove that they belong. His story is one of triumph and tragedy. He demonstrated his ability to fly a plane just like anyone else, but he endured heckling from fellow service members who should have treated him much better. Devotion is his story. It takes place during the lead up to the Korean War and follows a group of pilots through training, qualifications and finally the mission at the North Korean/Chinese border to take out vital enemy supply lines. Despite the hardship, Ensign Brown demonstrated his patriotism and commitment to the mission.

Apollo 10½: A Space Age Childhood (2022)

★★★½
Give me the option to choose one director’s works that I could take with me to a deserted island (which has a power source, television and D.V.D. player of course), and I would choose Richard Linklater and his astonishing lineup of amazing stories. Other than the unexceptional School of Rock (which Andrew Lloyd Webber turned into an unexceptional play) and Fast Food Nation, Linklater's output has been consistently remarkable. His careful study of Generation X through the years in all its highs (the Before trilogy) and lows (subUrbia) is the result of a curious Baby Boomer eye on the generation after his own. He has fondly recalled his own generation's coming of age (Dazed and Confused), but perhaps he sees the Xers, the latchkey kids, the Oregon Trailers, as both a proper continuation of and a direct result of his contemporaries. Baby Boomers have been getting a bad rap lately (the moronic "Okay boomer" taunt being one manifestation), but Linklater sees them (and himself) from a different angle. Apollo 10½: A Space Age Childhood isn't just a space movie, but it is also a celebration of a childhood shaped by the realization that the works of Robert Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke were coming close to fruition. It was a promise ultimately unfulfilled, but what a time to dream about it. The catalyst was right there on television, and in the case of young Stanley, right across town.

M3GAN (2023)

★★★
M3GAN's message is not subtle. A sense of discomfort came over me as I watched it, because I knew it was so right. Children (and some adults too) have become too enamored with iDevices and the like to the point that it might as well be an addiction. Not only that, but such inventions are too easy for parents to give to their children as a substitute for a babysitter or as a substitute for themselves when they feel they come up short in some facet of their role. What does the future hold with conditions such as these? A child psychiatrist in the movie provides the answer: the inability for children to form lasting relationships with real people. We're not quite there yet, but if artificial intelligence evolves to the point that a M3GAN doll becomes reality, then this movie provided a cautionary tale of what could happen. One of the founders of Facebook admitted that the whole purpose of the "Like" button was to get users to crave the satisfaction that comes with the "Like" notification, which induces a dopamine release that the body will want again and again. M3GAN is basically walking around and hitting the user's "Like" button in real time.

Bad Taste (1987)

★★
Before he made a name for himself internationally by adapting J.R.R. Tolkein's The Lord of the Rings novels into the beloved trilogy we know today, Peter Jackson was a splatter movie director who made the hilariously over-the-top gorefest Dead Alive (1992) and his debut film Bad Taste (1987). His first shot at mainstream success was the astonishing Heavenly Creatures (1994), but seven years before that, Jackson released this labor of love made with his friends and on a shoestring budget. Like George A. Romero, John Waters and David Lynch before him, Jackson came out swinging, and while he doesn't land every punch, he makes sure that the ones that do connect are adequate enough in quantity to make an impression. They do. While not an entirely successful film, Bad Taste is an admirable attempt to combine comedy and graphic violence in a way similar to what Re-Animator did before it.

Prom Night (1980)

zero stars
A character in Scream says that if someone watched Prom Night, that person would know the rules of the slasher film genre and survive if such a scenario ever came up. As I watched Prom Night, I couldn't find any rules established anywhere in its runtime, so its educational value is in question. Its entertainment value is also in question, since there is not a single decent acting job to be found, nor is there any reasonable attempt by the director to generate any kind of tension, nor is there any interesting dialogue written to get the plot going. In short, this is a wasteful 87 minutes of stunningly awful story exposition.

The Perfect Score (2004)

★★★
High schools place way too much pressure on students to achieve greatness on the S.A.T.s. Most big universities will accept students who score about average. I scored a 1060 on my first attempt in March 1993 (630 on math, 430 on verbal). The guidance counselors actually told me to retake the test to get my verbal score up. Retake? As if my total score wouldn't be good enough, they told me to try again, which I didn't do. I still managed to go to college. The Perfect Score is a movie that examines the paranoia of scoring high on the S.A.T. to get into the best colleges. It's pretty funny and has a good caper plot at its heart.