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Reviews
Chicago P.D. (2014)
Reprehensible. Morally Deranged.
Maybe it allows some wannabe tough guys in the audience to live out their bully fantasies and white supremacist dreams but this show promotes a reprehensible moral worldview. The cops are a disgrace to their badges and commit crimes more detestable than the criminals. They treat Constitutional Rights with contempt and justify it by suggesting that it's okay because they're doing it to criminals and for the greater good, a truly demented, perverted rationalization. Of course, you never see the countless times in real life when they do it to people who AREN'T criminals.
The people who watch this and agree with it are the kind of cowards who support all fascist systems because they are easily manipulated by fear mongering and stupidly think it will never happen to them; they are willing to sacrifice the laws they claim to respect to maintain the illusion of comfort. Cops are public servants, answerable to us for a reason. It's despicably immoral to let them act like a badge wearing goon squad with no oversight or to portray this kind of thuggish behavior as heroic. This show is contemptible in conception and exceedingly mediocre and unoriginal in execution. The characters are stock, borrowed from other previous cops shows, and the relationships never rise above cliche and never go any deeper than your average daytime soap opera.
The Wolf of Snow Hollow (2020)
This Writer-Director Definitely Has A Promising Cinematic Future.
Jim Cummings is the next Coen Brothers or Sam Raimi. Marvel should tap this guy to do something for them quick. I had no idea of what to expect from this movie. Just turned it on in the middle and was hooked immediately. I ended up watching it again from the beginning right after I finished it. Cummings immediately shows his skill and idiosyncratic style in the way that he edits, playing clever temporal tricks with the narrative that make it look like past and present moments are happening at the same time. It creates a trippy, original quality to the storytelling. Some people criticize Cummings as an actor but I think he's fantastic. He reminds me of Bruce Campbell in that he simultaneously portrays a parody of macho masculinity while also presenting a credible example of it. In other words, he manages to be both an action hero and a spoof of an action hero at the same time.
Equally impressive is his depiction of small town life. It rivals Lynch and the Coens for being both credibly realistic and weirdly eccentric. Cummings rides that fine line between slapstick comic and graphically jarring, executing both with tremendous craft. I look forward to his next movie. I hope he continues to work with genre material because he's every bit as fun as Sam Raimi or James Gunn. Good luck Jim, you've made a fan in me.
Supersonic (2016)
No Wonder They Never Made It In America.
Oasis was never close to being as big in America as they were in England and this documentary makes it easy to see why. Separated from their boorish media image and regional/cultural significance in the UK, and judged purely on their music, they amount to nothing more than a mediocre guitar band with a handful of catchy tunes (less than that really, just four). It's laughable that they swagger about as if they invented bad boy attitude while playing really some of the most tepid, middle-of-the-road rock music ever produced coupled with anodyne lyrics that strain for meaning but fall most often between risible surrealism and empty pretensions to importance. America picked up on many great UK bands from the Beatles and Stones through Elton and Bowie and Led Zeppelin, even Def Leppard, Culture Club and George Michael had a modicum of appealing talent, and we've spotted the ones that were nothing underneath from Cliff Richard to Robbie Williams to Kylie Minogue (yeah, I know, she's Australian, but the Brits are the ones who made her a superstar over there) and gave them a deserved ticket back to Mother England. You can add the painfully unimpressive, exceedingly middling Oasis to the bunch.
The 24th (2020)
Powerful, Little Known True Story.
This was an eye-opening historical drama. I don't recall ever seeing one like this. Black people are usually the victims in these types of stories. Here they fight back against the racist oppression and insult and it is stirring. The subject matter is, of course, disturbing, but the presentation is intelligent, highly dramatic and thrillingly effective. It's all the more mind-blowing because it really happened. A little trivia: Howard Hughes witnessed this event in real life and it so traumatized him that he became a scared, insane racist for the rest of his life. Interesting to see white people suffer the psychic fallout and deleterious emotional effects of their racial tyranny for a change.
Black Lightning (2018)
Ignore all the racist whiners and weaklings.
I honestly thought I would hate this show but I actually love it. The characters are relatable and interesting (I really love the two daughters), the action is exciting, the story is involving because of its politics not in spite of them, and the use of music is terrific. The people who are attacking it are doing so because it comes from an African-American perspective. It's just a bunch of white people who will attack ANYTHING that is empowering or complimentary to black people. Go to any board on IMDB for black films or TV shows and you find malicious white people who go there just to insult and undermine it. You'll notice that black people aren't petty enough to do that to white shows. Ignore the haters. This show is excellent.
Get Out (2017)
An ingenious genre film hiding a wicked sense of humor and a trenchant commentary
GET OUT was the most satisfying movie going experience I've had in a long time. It delivers brilliantly and viscerally in just the way that you want a paranoid horror thriller to but it also raises some topical questions within its horror conventions without undermining the fun and thrills. Jordan Peele definitely has a career ahead of him as a writer/director with a clever approach and a singular voice and vision when it comes to genre material.
The actors are uniformly excellent. Daniel Kaluuya is crucial to establishing the reality of the situation; he never overplays his character and you never catch him acting. Allison Williams is a pleasant surprise. I'd only known her from GIRLS and she shows a whole new potential here. LaKeith Stansfield is a star in the making; it's just that simple. Everything I see him in, he is impressive. The rest of the cast consists of some of the most reliable character actors working today, including a personal favorite: Stephen Root in a VERY surprising role.
GET OUT will be a future classic. You won't regret seeing it. It has several levels and it works smartly on all of them.
Baby Driver (2017)
Don't believe the hype
Saw it and, aside from a fun pre-title chase scene, this movie is wildly overpraised. Ansel Elgort is not the next big thing and the story, which revolves around three heists, is a real nothing burger. Jon Hamm and Jamie Foxx are both fine acting like bad ass tough guys, but their characters aren't original enough or interesting enough and the dialogue isn't consistently clever/cool enough to sustain the movie (there's only a handful of funny lines; Kevin Spacey gets the best one). The Usual Suspects, The Town, and Heat did it all MUCH better. The romance between Elgort and Lily James aims for sweet and mostly misses, but she's awfully cute and manages to make her time on screen pleasant. If you're expecting a lot of great car chase scenes you will definitely be disappointed. There's really only a couple and, as I said, only the first is impressive. Honestly, while watching it I was wondering what all the fuss was about. This is yet another example of people being swayed by movie critic peer pressure to praise a movie just so they can be part of the in-crowd, a member of the cool club. The truth is: the movie ain't all that.
Dear White People (2017)
Scared Racist Reviewers on this site
Just reading all the pathetic 1 star ratings by dishonest, clueless racists on IMDb makes me love this show even more. One desperately in denial individual claimed there's "NO. RACISM. NOWADAYS." That kind of ignorance is why shows like this are badly needed. Dear White People is sharp and funny and much appreciated. At a time when the worst kind of right wing bigotry is brazenly rearing its head in America (Alt-Right, anyone?), this show skewers the attitudes that are responsible. Make no mistake, it was the vile hate speech of racist right wingers that prompted IMDb to shut down its message boards, not so-called SJWs.
Dear White People the series is even better than the movie. Nice work, Netflix.