Kaos' way behind movie reviews

[Snakebite]

Three movies while I'm escaping global warming, holding in farts so the oceans stop boiling, eating a bag of bugs to save the environment, being grateful for all those Africans toiling in lithium pits 24/7 so I can spend $60,000 on a glorified golf cart, and wondering why - if the oceans truly are rising - John Fraud-ass Kerry allowed his BFF Odumba to spend $12 million on a mansion mere feet from the beach. 

The Outlaws
I've seen this film made WAY better when it was called The In-Laws and starred Peter Falk and Alan Arkin.

When I saw the Happy Madison logo, I should have immediately expected shit laced with turd peanuts. Sandler is worthless. I don't know how much input he had in this, but it was pretty awful.

Basic storyline... nerd doofus schlub is getting married to somebody out of his league and with whom he has zero chemistry. To be honest, the schlub - played by Adam Devine who -  is pretty shitty in nearly everything he's in and plays the exact same babbling fool in each role he takes and has never had chemistry with any co-star - is only doing the one trick his pony knows. It's annoying and grating. Skin-crawlingly bad. 

So the doofus meets his bride's family for the first time and they're possibly master criminals involved in some feud with a female gangster. 

Whoever directed this thinks he's way more clever than he is.  It's sad to see Pierce Brosnan degrade himself by appearing in this half-baked gooey pile of mess.  Every gag misfires. Every setup flops. There are a few mildly funny moments, but this movie is nothing but one cringe after another. 

Devil Conspiracy
Heavy handed interpretation of Biblical end times. 

St. Michael has to return to the earth to prevent Satan from resurrecting Jesus as the dark-side Christ , and bringing all the dark angels up from Hell through a hole in the ground managed by a lumbering, poorly rendered beast. 

So much mumbo jumbo. Film takes itself seriously. You should not.  It isn't horror. 

It's kind of like the director ate The Omen, Rosemary's Baby and Terminator 2 and then threw up the digested contents into a cracked wooden bowl. 

Horrible acting. Laughable CGI. Ridiculous story.

The only thing the film has going for it at all is the over-the-top evil Cruella DeVille ooze of Eveline Hall. Oh, she's awful, but at least she looks like she knows she's overacting and hamming it up. 

Heart of Stone
There's a lot going on here. 

So there's actually a shadow organization running global ops outside government control, but trust us, it's a GOOD thing. They only do GOOD things! They have a giant self-aware computer that (hahaha!) resides in the clouds, literally. This computer "The Heart" can hack into and see anything. Your Alexa, your phone, every camera, every computer and instantly analyze what it "sees" and calculate options.

Gal Gadot is one of their agents. Like Wonder Woman without the bracelets. She flies! She fights! She's an expert driver! A master of languages! She can kick all kinds of ass.

Some counter-agent, for a supremely flimsy reason and against all possible realistic odds, decides to hack into and take over/take down The Heart. It's Gal's job (as Rachel) to stop him. 

This is a more than anything, a Gal Gadot vehicle. That's about it.  She's hot and can kick your ass in the blink of an eye.  She's hot. And she's hot. Then again, she's hot.

But even her hotness can't overcome some of this film's flaws.  Nomad for one. Who the fuck is going to put their trust and lives in the hands of a screeching, inept black woman with shitty teeth and a bad accent.

The storyline gets a little/lot muddled as the film bounces from one chase/action scene to the next.
There's a flight scene with squirrel suits
There are TWO parachute scenes
There is a motorcycle chase and a snowcycle chase
There's an exploding zeppelin
There's a lengthy car chase/shootout
There are multiple fist-fights and gun battles
There are foot chases and cliff dives
There are explosions

So much action.

Gal Gadot is ridiculously hot, but to be completely honest, her almost sleepy, bemused, banal acting style, her tone-mangled english and her slow, lanky, liquid hotness really don't work well for her in a role of this intensity. 

She's stupid hot, but believe it or not, the spunky little opposition played by Indian newcomer Alia Bhatt pulled some of the attention away from her hotness. The thick little 30-year old had a heat factor of her own that held up well against Gadot's all-time epic smoke.

Is it a good movie? Not so much. It's more like one somewhat interconnected action vignette tacked on to another.

You throw out a review on heart of stone, but not the Extraction movies? It feels like it’s on purpose at this point!

Gal doesn’t do it for me. This comes from a guy who favors the Middle Eastern look above all others. I do think it’s because she plays into her looks to compensate for subpar acting.   The chick in Haywire/Mandolirian is a better actress, and more of a believable badass.

[Kaos]

You throw out a review on heart of stone, but not the Extraction movies? It feels like it’s on purpose at this point!

Gal doesn’t do it for me. This comes from a guy who favors the Middle Eastern look above all others. I do think it’s because she plays into her looks to compensate for subpar acting.   The chick in Haywire/Mandolirian is a better actress, and more of a believable badass.

Say you adore the gift of the penii without actually saying it.

[Snakebite]

Say you adore the gift of the penii without actually saying it.

Okay.  That moved the needle.

[Kaos]

The second season of Paramount's Strange New Worlds Star Trek show was entertaining enough to prompt me to revisit the original series on Pluto.  That led me to boldly going to...

Star Trek: The Motion Picture
Lots went wrong here.  It was good to get the band back together, but well... damn. 

The muted color pajama-looking uniforms were atrocious. Everybody was in some shade of beige or off-white.

Series creator Gene Rodenberry was an avowed athiest, so it wasn't surprising to see this movie tackle the concept of God - which in his mind couldn't possibly exist.  It was a theme often visited on the original series as various other-worldly beings attempted to take the mantle of some sort of God.

It was so bad and so cheese-filled, I'm surprised the remainder of the films were green-lit. The nostalgia factor that drove fans to the theaters made up for a lot of shortcomings. You'd have to understand the cult-level status the three uneven seasons of the original series earned to get why this movie was such a big deal in 1979. Fans were willing to overlook a lot of craptastic nonsense to see Kirk, Spock, Uhura, Checkov, Sulu, Scotty, and Bones together again.     

In a weird trivia note, the theme for this film was repurposed as the theme for Next Generation.  That never made sense. I guess they just didn't want to pay for new music.   

The Wrath of Khan
The best of the Star Trek films (from what I remember) still has some faults, but it's the only one of the original cast efforts that sort of holds up and also hews truer to the original concept. 

Ricardo Montalban (Khan) was a bulked up son-of-a-bitch at 60 in this film.  Bulked to the point that people have often accused him of wearing a prosthetic chest.  He didn't. 

No question the special effects were rudimentary.  The ear worm closeup was amazing for its time but really doesn't measure up.  I remember watching it in theaters and being grossed out, but now it's just cringe-inducing for its sheer awfulness.

Still, this was what the series was about.  Kirk using his wits and relying on his team to defeat a stonger, more powerful opponent.

Montalban really made this movie, though. His performance elevated the entire exercise.   

Enjoyed this one.

The Search for Spock
Leonard Nimoy (Spock) directed this transporter full of tribble shit. 

Wrong in so many directions.  Everything from Checkov's pageboy-collared pepto bismol pantstuit to Miguel Ferrer sitting at a control deck on the bridge to Christopher Lloyd channeling Doc as a Klingon was bad.  Just so bad. 

The bar scene where McCoy/Spock is looking for a transport stole directly from Star Wars IV: New Hope while simultaneously foreshadowing Jar Jar Binks was cringeworthy.

I know there are more, but this is easily my least favorite so far. 

This whole movie came about because Nimoy regretted demanding his character to die at the end of Khan and decided the perpetual paydays might not be such a bad idea.  So they made an entire film to allow him to resurrect himself using some tacked on footage from Khan.

Everything about this movie looked cheap, too.  The original series was well known for its cheapness. Cardboard sets and Christmas lights. A big budget movie shouldn't give that feel.   

- Reviews for 4, 5, 6, etc. - coming as soon as I get around to watching them.  FWIW, I have never watched TNG and I have no intention of ever watching it or any of the movies it spawned. I'm less interested in Deep Space Nine, Voyager, or Discovery.  I've heard Enterprise is possibly worth a look, but I'm not sure I'll ever get to that either.   

Couple of odd notes:

Kirk is a TERRIBLE actor. All of them are, frankly. 

Spock (perhaps purposely) did not age well at all. He was just 48 when Star Trek: TMP was aired and looked at least a decade older.

The would have been better off sticking with the original uniforms and color schemes.  They were almost as bad as KISS
going from the streamlined early look to the bat wings to the demon suit that looked like chewed up tinfoil to the enormous capes to the lycra From the Elder era to the fruity neon glam and then back to the beginning again.  The unis in The Motion Picture were the worst, but they got progressively more complicated and bulky as each film came out.  Should have just hung on to the blue, red and yellow originals. 

[Kaos]

Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home

Shed of some of the cheapness, and devoid of the unintentional farce of Christopher Lloyd mugging it up as a Klingon, this film fares a little bit better. 

The uniforms are ... uniform... and mesh with what came before. The oompa loompa poofy curved elf hats on the Vulcan workers were asinine, though.

This movie's primary flaw is that it seems to take it self way too seriously, a mis-step which drains all the fun out of what should be a fun exercise in the early going. And then we get to the whales.

THAT part of the movie felt like "old" Star Trek. Fish-out-of water (pun!) time-traveling story that only gets a little bit preachy about saving the environment.  I figure climate fear-mongers like Al Gore probably jerked his dick raw over that part of it. Oh GOD, man destroyed ALL the whales by the early 21st century (yet another dire warning that had no merit).

Some of the CGI is truly bad. Seems like Trek had a problem keeping up with the times.   This was also the first "fat Scotty" edition.

The Vulcan chick with the curly mullet is back briefly in this one and she's just YICK.  I don't know what she looked like without the pointy ears, but she's definitely no Kirstie Alley.

I hear people talk about diversity all the time. Trek was way ahead of that curve. In IV and in III, there are crowd scenes with everything you can imagine. American Indians, even. It's done to the point of absurdity. 

All in all, not a TERRIBLE movie - like III.  Once it finally got into trekking like the old days it was actually kind of fun.  If I'm ranking in watchability, this one falls just behind Khan.   

Star Trek V: The Final Frontier
A muddled morass of mangled story and motivations that at times descended into almost parody. 

Trying to get Spock to sing Row Your Boat in a frivolous and unnecessary extended camping in the woods scene?  What a waste of time.  The laborious, silly sequence was, I suppose, intended to evoke a sense of fun and whimsy but all it did was drag the movie to a near standstill before it even really got started. 

Uhura freaking FAN DANCING?

This is one of the worst of all Star Trek films. How it made it to the screen is a mystery. 

One glaringly apparent major flaw?  The CGI budget was apparently trimmed to $18.32.  And that was wasted on neon. Character makeup was really bad.   

Yes, of course, this is another where the existence and meaning of God is pondered.  That seems to happen a lot. But this film really felt like five or six different writers died along the way and the next one in line didn't bother to read or watch what had come before and took the story in a different direction.

[AUJarhead]

My favorite memory of Star Trek IV was in Mad Magazine..

“Uhura, we are in need of some 20th century money. Go hustle some money from those sailors over there.”

“Captain, need I remind you we are in San Fransisco?”

“You’re right!  Sulu, you and Chekhov go hustle some money from those sailors over there.”

[Kaos]

My favorite memory of Star Trek IV was in Mad Magazine..

“Uhura, we are in need of some 20th century money. Go hustle some money from those sailors over there.”

“Captain, need I remind you we are in San Fransisco?”

“You’re right!  Sulu, you and Chekhov go hustle some money from those sailors over there.”

Loved Mad Magazine when I was bumping up against the teenage years. 

Skewering social commentary.  They skewed Star Trek often.



Was a big thing for a while. Spawned competitors Crazy and Cracked magazines.  Wonder where all of them are these days?  I still see Mad occasionally in Books and Noble, but haven't picked one up in decades.

[Snaggletiger]

MAD was the titz.  I always loved the Spy vs Spy strip.  I pulled for the black dude.

[wesfau2]

MAD was the titz.  I always loved the Spy vs Spy strip.  I pulled for the black dude.

Was a huge fan.  Asked my grandma for a subscription for my sixth birthday.  She obliged.  It spoke to the subversive parts of me that standup comedy was awakening (shoutout to HBO in the early 80s).  Was hooked until I discovered girls, beer and weed.

[Kaos]

Was a huge fan.  Asked my grandma for a subscription for my sixth birthday.  She obliged.  It spoke to the subversive parts of me that standup comedy was awakening (shoutout to HBO in the early 80s).  Was hooked until I discovered girls, beer and weed.

I always went to the drugstore with my grandma looking for new issues of

Kamandi
Batman
Werewolf by Night
Plop!
Fangoria

and, of course Mad. 

I caught onto Mad when I found a box of them under my uncle’s bed when he went to college. I was probably six or seven.   Those magazines  and a box of records including The Stones, Beatles, and Paul Revere and the Raiders changed my life. 

[Kaos]

Star Trek: The Undiscovered Country

The last film with the full crew. 

Kim Cattrall plays a Vulcan in this one, about a decade removed from her howling turn as Lassie in the underrated Porky's movie. She aged well. Widely repeated rumor is that Cattrall held a fully nude photoshoot on the last day of filming. Naked Vulcan on the bridge. Spock found out and had the film destroyed before any of the shots were printed. Cattrall was still relatively hot at the time and it's a shame the world was Spockblocked from seeing that.

As for the movie?  It's a lot better than Final Frontier.  Roddenberry was dead and didn't interject his "they have to face God" atheism so the film was freed to become more of a straightforward "let's battle the Klingons and our own traitors" drama.

Yes, there was a brief "green" moment when Spock pronounced that the Klingons had destroyed their own empire via conspicuous consumption and a lack of conservation efforts.  That was quickly forgotten as the movie moved on to the physical and mental battles with the Klingon horde.

One thing I've noticed throughout the series (TV and movies) is that creating the Klingons is an iffy proposition.  Their look changes and it's rarely realistic. The makeup is horrible.  In this one, Christopher Plummer is a good actor and does a credible job as the Klingon nemesis,  but he looks more like a subdued version of Sarris from Galaxy Quest than he does a Klingon. 

The only one that "looks" right is the guy who played Worf in TNG - who plays Worf's grandfather here. 

Just as an aside, it was an extremely shitty idea to recycle an actor (David Warner) who played a human in 5 to portray a Klingon in 6.  Bad form. 

The story is a Cold War metaphor as two rival empires - the Federation and Klingons - search for a way to co-exist in peace when there are those on both sides of the "wall" (aka the neutral zone) who conspire to prevent the accords.

Once again, the CGI leaves a lot to be desired. That's frustrating because the movie was made in an era when special effects were improving dramatically. This one looks like it stuck with effects not much better than those of the original 1960s series - and in some cases were worse. I know ILM was on the cutting edge of SFX in those days but I don't get the sense that ILM was involved in the god awful CGI that infected most of the Trek films.

Things to watch for?  Christian Slater in a brief appearance as a red shirt.  Red Forman (before his career-building turn in Robocop) as a double-dumbass Federation president who doesn't do much but look like the blind martial arts master who trained Beatrix Kiddo in the second Kill Bill.

All in all, it wasn't the triumphant sendoff the cast and writers probably hoped for but it wasn't a bowl of horse shit like the prior film was, so that was something at least. 

It's weird to me that this short-lived TV show that was poorly scripted, done on a shoe-string budget with ridiculously cheap and phony sets, that was so badly acted that the cast (other than Shatner) really hasn't been able to do a single other thing in the craft in their lives, managed to generate the cult status it has, It's beyond baffling that it was also able to spawn six movies of varying quality. To be honest none of the movies were great cinema. All of them struggled with absurd scripts, atrocious overacting, cheap SFX, and fucked up casting choices - particularly among the Klingons (and Kirk's afro-haired son). 

In terms of quality, the three (rumored to be 4 eventually) Chris Pine prequels are massive improvements on anything in the original Trek world or in any of the six films. The acting is substantially better and so are the sets and CGI.  For that matter, so, too, is Strange New Worlds.

I wish I fully understood why people - me included, I guess - have such an affinity for this concept and these characters.  I just watched six movies, several of which can rightly be categorized as utterly awful. Why? 

[Kaos]

The Pope's Exorcist

Inspired by a true story.  There was a guy who was the chief exorcist for the Vatican and this film was loosely adapted from some of his writings.

Claims to be a horror movie, but there's precious little of that.  It's more ponderous and slow moving.  Almost everything we see here we have seen before.  It's like it took the Possession checklist and ticked all the boxes.

1. Kid gets possessed- Check
2. Kid's face scars up - check
3. Crosses turn upside down - check
4. Levitation - check
5. Kid spews profanity - check
AND so on...

The only thing that really makes it worth watching is the dash of humor Russell Crowe brings to the role of the chief exorcist.  Without that, this is just a paint-by-numbers movie about the devil inside that we've seen done (literally) hundreds of times since Exorcist shocked the world 40 years ago.  Fact is that this film stole a lot directly from the Exorcist as it ladled every demonic inhabitation trope into the script.

Speaking of, there's a new version of that series coming out in October.  Hope it has something more/different to add.

[Kaos]

Cold Comes the Night

Breaking Bad was over and Bryan Cranston was looking for his first post-Bad project. 

So he chooses a mostly-blind Russian criminal and opts to adopt the worst Russian accent ever captured on film.

This isn't a great movie, isn't a good movie, isn't a terrible movie. It's just a moderately effective hillbilly-ish potboiler about a trashy motel owner in a trashy town that gets involved with Cranston's unintentionally hilarious faux Russkie's efforts to get back some bag of money. 

Alice Eve (who continuing the Star Trek theme plays Carol Marcus, the eventual mother of James T. Kirk's only son in Star Trek: Into Darkness) is the trashy motel owner.  Without makeup she's pretty schlumpy and her jaw deserves its own billing.

Cranston survived this abysmal career choice, but there are a lot of actors who wouldn't have.  It was pretty bad and Cranston's performance was a big reason the film washed up dead on the beach.

[Kaos]

Star Trek
Star Trek: Into Darkness
Star Trek: Beyond

These movies got a lot of undeserved criticism primarily because people don't take JJ Abrams seriously.  All three are in many ways far superior to the original series or any of the six films in which the original cast participated. These are fun, fast-paced movies that pay more than enough respect to the source material and also do a great job of capturing (and in some cases elevating) the characters. These films remain mostly within canon while still telling quality and engaging stories.   

Pine isn't a great actor, but he's a great Kirk. He imbues the character with the self-assured swagger and rampaging libido Shatner exuded even in a world where that kind of alpha-male behavior is frowned on. 

The rest of the cast is just as good.

Gamora fleshes out Uhura and gives the character depth.  Karl Urban is close to perfect as McCoy.  Harold and Kumar's Sulu is so far superior to Takei's freaky oddness. Simon Pegg's Mr. Scott is a decent addition.  When I first watched these I thought Zach Guinto was a masterful Spock, but on further reflection his characterization is probably the worst of the bunch.  The late Anton Yelchin is a little weak as Checkov, too, though.

These films had what none of those three seasons and six movies had. Good actors, decent scripts and a budget of more than $11.82 for special effects.  Everything about these films is bigger, deeper, broader, more fully-realized than what came before. These are real movies, not cheaply-made cash grabs with sets made out of cardboard and styrofoam. 

There are, of course mis-steps.  But they are few.

1. Tyler Perry as a Star Fleet big shot
2. Jamming an improbable Spock/Uhura romance into the mix
3. Most egregious of all, the misfire of casting Bumblebitch Crinklesnag as Khan.  Don't necessarily disagree with the story needing to be told/re-booted/refreshed but Cumbershart was completely wrong for the role.  It really could have been done without the Khan reference by changing a few minor details.

Ranking them is hard.  The first is probably the best overall.  But all three are more watchable than any of the original cast films which is good and sad at the same time.  All three are enjoyable films. 

Rumor is there will one day be a fourth.  Count me in.

[Kaos]

Devil's Knot

It must be accidental Reese Witherspoon week. 
First, I watched Election again, where she's a completely hateable character.

Then, I seent her cute little titties bouncing around[/i] wide open in that Twilight movie with Paul Newman when I accidentally ran across that film (See brief review Pg 167). Didn't hate that so much.

A day or two later I came across a movie called Devil's Knot.  It's a bleeding heart re-telling of the "Memphis Three" story. She's the mom of the murdered kid and falls so deep into her (likely real) southern accent that it slides into mockery.  Colin Firth is in it too, doing his Southern British accent. 

It's not a good movie, it's one of those celebrity causes where they "band together" without knowing anything about the facts and decide how justice should be dispensed. So they twist the story to suit whatever narrative they're shoveling.

It's not really worth watching.

[Kaos]

Plane

Gerard Butler improbably lands a plane that's crashing not once, but twice.  And he improbably gets it back up in the air once, too. 

In between there's the tired trope of the black bad guy prisoner with a heart of gold, some kidnappings and muggings, a lot of shooting and running, and a lot of other outrageous fighting action. 

It's a movie that doesn't really take itself seriously as it creates situations for sprawling action scenes.  It's not a great movie. It isn't going to give you any great insight or change your view of the world.  But it's not going to bore you either. 

I may have reviewed this before, I don't even know. 

[Kaos]

Saturday Night Double Feature of disappointment. 

Swallow
Presented as a gripping thriller as the lead character descends into madness.

No.  It was not. It was a slow-moving story of a bored housewife who is trying to make please her business-focused husband and his rich family by adopting the meek persona of a 50s era wife.  She vacuums in a dress and heels.  She puts on a gown to present him dinner she’s worked on. 

She feels unseen and unheard.  She copes by swallowing random objects.  Not dicks.  Marbles.  Thumbtacks.  Batteries.  Screwdrivers.  Dirt.  Rocks. And then puts on gloves and digs through her own shit to retrieve them. 

Husband and family find out.  Try to take control of her life (and protect the baby she’s carrying).  Just makes her want to eat more weird things. 

In the end she sort of escapes.  And then swallows something else. 

The lead actress was attractive in a “looks like a real person”  way.  Seemed to have some decent sweater puppies but they never popped out. 

A movie that seemed like it was just trying to make some kind of profound statement.  It failed. Even the swallowing was a fail. Only showed her putting two or three things in her mouth.

Audition
Heard the buzz for years about this “brutal” Japanese movie.  Went to the well hoping to get some of the bad taste from Swallow out of my mouth. 

Another fail.  Another very slow moving film until the last six minutes. 

Japanese widower uses a friend in the film industry to set up a mostly fake audition for the lead role in an upcoming film (that will never be made) to search for a potential wife.

Told by his exec friend to narrow the hundreds of applications down to 30 candidates.  In doing so he fixates on one. She’s not the best looking.  She doesn’t have the best body.  But she’s the one.

He uses his position to contact her and gradually — really gradually — make his move on a weekend getaway.   

Things go wrong after that.  Her backstory unravels.  Or does it?  Past suitors spill her secrets. Or do they? 

The final few minutes of desperate carnage are intercut with flash backs and flash forwards that undercut most of the film’s previous 14 hours or runtime. 

Take away that last scene and all you’re left with is an overly long meet-cute tentative romantic comedy. 

The juice of those last few chaotic and surreal moments - even if you accept that they aren’t a fever dream - are not worth the plodding squeeze to get there

[Kaos]

Been sick for a couple of days.   Congestion, etc.  I angered my parents (and a few others) because I refused to "get tested. To what end?  What would a "positive" result provide other than an opportunity for someone to pad statistics and for the alarmists to shriek "SPIKE!"  Tested?  Fuck all that.

The down time allowed me to watch a number of movies when I wasn't asleep.  Ditching football opened to door to watch even more.  Let's start with...


Big George Foreman

I had high hopes for this.  I really wanted to understand a little better how George went from a snarling, raw brawler to genial Grandpa George. I already knew the basic outline, I was looking for something to provide color.  I didn't get that here. 

The movie tried. But it felt superficial. It barely scratched the surface the man, the times, and the journey. The lead actor didn't have enough charisma to pull it off. 

The Collective

No.  I turned it off after 8 minutes.   

[Kaos]

Pearl
Mia Goth is terrifying.  Just in general, not as a character.  If the credits scene of this movie doesn't make you cringe? Something is wrong with you.

This is a prequel to the film X (reviewed on page 162 of this thread) and oddly sets up Mia Goth as a different character than she plays in X.

This was an extremely weird movie with sporadic moments of mayhem that was way more cringe inducing than horrifying.  It played almost like a SNL parody of American Horror Story.

An early scene in a cornfield should have been enough to get me to turn it off, but I didn't.

I did not enjoy this movie and I do NOT like Mia Goth.  Plan to avoid anything she's in from here on out.

The Invitation
This was not a bad movie. It was just out of place. Had this movie come out in, say, 1965?  It would probably be more highly regarded.

Instead it just felt tired. Everything that was done in this film has been done in others before it and in most cases done better.  There was nothing to set it apart.

Not really worth watching.

[Kaos]

Pinball
I didn't expect to enjoy this movie.  The only reason I watched it is because I own a working pinball machine (one of my prize possessions) and I was curious about the history of the game. I'm glad I did because it was a very easy, charming film that I ended up enjoying more than I would have thought possible.

The movie tells the story of Roger Sharpe, a struggling writer for GQ magazine who was a pinball aficionado. He helped lead the fight to overturn former Mayor LaGuardia's ban on the machines in New York City.

Mike Faist (who I've never heard of) is extremely likeable as the Sharpe. He carries himself with an unwarranted confidence and earnest humble goofiness that works extremely well. 

It should be noted that the glued-on mustache Faist wears should have billing of its own. It's ridiculous but seems an essential part of the character.

Along the way it wedges in a slow-burn romance in (with someone who'd never be interested in the lead actor in real life).  Crystal Reed plays the single-mom love interest and she brings believable sweetness to the role. I found myself liking her a lot and enjoying when she was on screen. She completely inhabited the late 70s mod chic look and owned it in a way most girls of that era tried but weren't able to do. 

Turned out to be a sweet, sentimental movie  that I'm glad I watched. Not something I'll go back to again and again, but good to watch. 

Crack
Netflix documentary about the epidemic of crack cocaine that swept the US in the 80s. 

All you need to know about what this pile of garbage tries to say is that it was all Regan's fault and black people were persecuted. 

This is a mass of lies wrapped around a crack-rock-sized sliver of truth.  It's not a documentary, it's inDOCtrination. 

Pass.