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.

Not Another Teen Movie (2001)

★★★
Not Another Teen Movie is a total riot. It's vulgar, crass, smutty and thoroughly unrefined, but darn it all it's hilarious too often to dislike. Much like his lead character's gift for sloppily applying paint to a canvas and creating a simplistic yet comprehensible picture, director Joel Gallen hastily fills his frame with gags that run the gamut from tasteless to bizarre, yet it all comes together to form a coherent story that smuggles in every familiar teen archetype from over a dozen movies while stitching together the plots of She's All That and Varsity Blues. The result resembles a quilt of oddly mismatched colors and patterns that at least functions in its primary purpose of providing warmth. I suppose we can thank Keenan Ivory Wayans's Scary Movie for setting the stage for this kind of oversexualized parody.

Next Friday (2000)

★
As of this writing, I have yet to see Friday, a 1995 comedy of which I know nothing. After seeing Next Friday, it isn't likely that I'll watch the first film anytime soon, though failed sequels are common enough that I should probably check it out one day. This movie is an absolute abomination. It contains some of the unfunniest jokes to hit the screen. Is it really funny to watch a dog crap on someone's yard? To make it worse, the camera lingers on the pile for about five seconds before cutting away. Then Mr. Jones (John Witherspoon) steps out of his house, and the intelligent viewer will anticipate his coming into contact with the pile in one way or another.

Nobody (2021)

★★★
Nobody may be a low-rent John Wick, but it's darn good one. It works largely because of our familiarity with Bob Odenkirk as the shady lawyer Saul Goodman from Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul. Saul Goodman is not a fighter or weapons expert, but he's good at feigning ignorance and relying on his wits to surprise the opposition. Odenkirk's Hutch Mansell is much the same way. Years ago he left his position as a top assassin working for the "three letter agencies" to start a new life as a family man. Just as in John Wick, the villains cross the retired hero without realizing who he is, which starts a series of fights that escalates into a final confrontation between the hero and an army of mobsters, featuring lots of amazing stunts and gun battles. Take those Saul Goodman traits and give them to a guy possessing everyman looks and the skills of an "auditor" (as he calls it), and you have an interesting blend of characteristics for a new kind of hero. He lacks Keanu Reeves's steely-eyed intensity and Jason Statham's gruff demeanor. Instead, he has this nonthreatening appearance that conceals the quick reflexes of a seasoned assassin.

Night of the Living Dead: 30th Anniversary Edition (1999)

★½
The 30th anniversary edition of Night of the Living Dead will no doubt go down in history as one of filmdom's greatest oddities. In 1968, a group of Pittsburgh filmmakers made one of the scariest horror movies of all time. Night of the Living Dead was groundbreaking, influential and shocking all at once. It went on to continued success on video thanks to a missing copyright notice and eventually spawned two sequels. In 1998, for the film's 30th anniversary, original co-writer John A. Russo wrote and directed new scenes and inserted them into the original narrative. Not since the colorization of old movies have I heard of a more ludicrous form of film rape.

Norma Jean and Marilyn (1996)

★½
I admit that I know very little of the life of Marilyn Monroe. Nonetheless, I think I can safely say that Norma Jean and Marilyn does her little justice. The movie doesn't go wrong in the acting or the directing, but in the material itself. Jill Isaacs's screenplay gives us a Marilyn Monroe who was pathetic and stupid. There's no hint of the legendary actress at her best. We see no indication that she was talented. Instead, we see a loser who slept her way to the top and trampled on everyone who got in her way.