THE NAKED GUN (2025)

It all began in what was basically a shot-for-shot remake of a 1950's Airline Disaster film named ZERO HOUR starring Dana Andrews as Ted Stryker... and the "y" became an "i" and Andrews became Robert Hays... But the scene-stealer was one of three then-veteran actors who were famous for being extremely serious in extremely serious movies, making their otherwise deadpan humor funnier around such non-stop joke-a-second, modern-era hijinks...

Then, Leslie Neilson and the AIRPLANE writer/directors created a TV series that everyone seemed to like, but no one seemed to watch because POLICE SQUAD only lasted a handful of episodes... But there's a thing called "cult following," and SQUAD had it in droves... igniting THE NAKED GUN movie franchise starring Nielson partnered with another deadly-serious veteran actor George Kennedy... The difference between the reboot's modern-day-veteran star Liam Neeson and Leslie Nielson (or Robert Stack, Lloyd Bridges and Peter Graves for that matter) is the latter came from a time before affected sarcasm turned everything (from war movies to action movies to horror movies) into partial comedies... Which, back in the 1980's, turned Neilson into a kind of thawed-out neanderthal where the humor relies on him being stuck in a time he doesn't (or his character Frank Drebin doesn't) understand...But Neeson, whose done every genre under the sun ranging from historical dramas to semi-comedies to a barrage of high-octane action-flicks, simply understands too much, so it's really no big deal that he's a hard-nosed cop surrounded by a myriad of jokey gags... he can simply embrace or ignore them and it doesn't really matter... Meanwhile, some of the jokes are kinda funny, some are basically ignored, some even seem made to be ignored and very few make you laugh out loud since somewhere within this NAKED GUN reboot is a genuine detective drama that didn't want to be humorous at all... For example, had they cast Liam as the new Dirty Harry, there would be no difference, really... but neither would work because neither franchise should have been rebooted in the first place.

FRANKENSTEIN (2025)

When Mia Goth's Elizabeth visits muscular Jacob Elordi as The Creature, it's apparent that director Guillermo del Toro didn't really make FRANKENSTEIN to be more faithful to the Mary Shelley novel, but to basically remake his Oscar-winning THE SHAPE OF WATER... 

Which was originally intended to be another Universal Monster reboot for CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON... turned into a sexual romance between a very human woman and a brooding, misunderstood monstrosity: The problem is, neither creature is very scary... not enough to fit within the horror-genre as particularly promised herein...

And there are added elements that never needed explaining in James Whale's 1931 classic, like how Victor Frankenstein... played with intensely charmless charisma by Oscar Isaac... was able to build such an elaborate castle-lab to create/recreate life (involving a wealthy Christoph Walz as an expository afterthought)... An otherwise important process basically rushed through to get to that beauty/beast romance in what's semi-intriguing in the buildup but, once The Creature shares a few moments with his lady-friend (after killing sailors like a tyrannical ninja during the icy opening), it feels like a strewn-together 90-minute montage that could have worked better had it been a more "fleshed-out" (pun intended) Netflix miniseries, actually following the plot instead of merely covering the theme. Rates: **

ONE, TWO, MANY (2008)

Stuttering John Melendez went from being a once-great celebrity-crashing interviewer on The Howard Stern Show to a kind of dare-hire-announcer by Jay Leno on The Tonight Show, and watching ONE, TWO, MANY it seems like he never left Stern and had nothing to do with... while this was made... being part of the biggest late night talk show franchise ever... The latter because there are hardly any star cameos here... the kind needed that even, back in the 1970's, guerilla filmmakers like Greydon Clark would insert into his junkyard vehicles to legitimize them... Also, John's basically doing a mid-1990's Stern imitation in the simple plot-line of being obsessed with finding the perfect girl who's the perfect girl because she'll invite another girl to bed... In that he discovers who's the best thing here... who doesn't seem as cheap and contrived as the two-dollar sets that looks as if they dressed the same studio-location into apartment rooms, bathrooms and nightclubs depending on the loose script where John and his slacker buddy hang around New York City...

Enter Bellamy Young, a beautiful actress who has actually done some mainstream vehicles, and she's far too pretty for both the real John and his fictional character loosely based on him... the Stern show attack interview niche-niche fame replaced by a 15-minute run on phone commercials with a monkey... She almost makes ONE, TWO, MANY seem like it's almost a faint replica of the kind of rom-com John seems to be both parodying and celebrating with a barrage of sex-comedy relationship cliches and the kind of nasty-schlock, from one-night-stands to flatulence, that, again, was what Howard Stern pioneered into becoming so commonplace that John's movie comes across as being far more dated than risque... It's questionable why National Lampoon would produce this mess; then again the two movies between their only hits, ANIMAL HOUSE and VACATION, were MOVIE MADNESS and CLASS REUNION, two of the worst raunchy comedies ever created...  But throughout all the garbage, Ms. Young is worthy of so much more, and it's a mystery why she even wasted her time, beauty and talent here at all... but it's John alone who goes down with this ship, with his name literally written all over it.  Rating: 1/2

DOWNTON ABBEY: THE GRAND FINALE (2025)

Thomas was one of the best characters not only on Downton Abbey but maybe in the history of British TV series. He was an antagonist, from being a coward during the war to scheming against pretty much everyone in the downstairs working servant chambers... The fact he was homosexual, on the show itself, simply added to his perplexed nature... gave him a more human quality but hardly enough humanity to where he wasn't desperate and edgy, and enigmatic, interesting... 

But in the last of three movies, having already hooked up with a famous actor, here he merely gives knowing expressions of being the secret servant who is really an equal lover... deleting any significant edge the character once had... In different ways, the same could be said of everyone in the cast... by this third movie, which centers around the meager plot of royals having dinner at the titular castle, no one really means anything, and that ranges from the upstairs and the downstairs... 

None of the characters are even part of the ironical nature of the haves and have-nots since, being so beloved, their dreams came true upon the first motion picture so audiences can see them given a happy ending, from being contentedly married to becoming famous scriptwriters... So there is no tension or drama. The only b-story involves real life dramatist Noel Coward giving the same "one day we'll have rights" expression while supposedly basing his own future famous works on the characters here... Who aren't even worthy or intriguing enough to make their own movie entertaining... a series that should have ended either on TV or one farewell movie. Three is two too many. Rating: *1/2

AKA CHARLIE SHEEN (2025)

It's pretty amazing that you have a man with a live-changing disease, who was fired from a dream job getting 2M dollars per situation-comedy episode, who did every drug in the book and actually made drugs seem cool to kids on the internet... 

With all that, the director of AKA CHARLIE SHEEN seems intent on capturing Sheen's smug, cat-that-ate-the-canary grin about all the things that lead to one person's complete and utter downfall: Has it been long enough since the famous (or infamous) 2011 "Winning" breakdown that this all all really cool now? That's surprising given the whole MeToo Movement (backed by Netflix from the start) that made this kind of lionizing glimpse into womanizing and women-beating so... not popular... But other than the fact that the writer/director seems like an adoring fanboy not only interviewing Charlie Sheen but celebrating his actions, you have a subject that's interesting enough to merit a pretty interesting documentary... That's sporadically effective also despite how many unnecessary filler distractions are spliced throughout almost every word Sheen speaks about his roller-coaster life... The famous indie MY DINNER WITH ANDRE had a far less interesting subject taking about things at a restaurant table with very few edits... So of all people, Charlie "I've Done Everything Under the Sun" Sheen didn't need every syllable spoken to be orchestrated/backed by some kind of pop culture snippet, ranging from Charlie's own films (including Super 8 from childhood) to various old commercials... Also, the interviews weren't as good as they could have been, including Sheen's first ex-wife, who pretends she was reluctant to be interviewed, and that without her input the doc wouldn't be as interesting... The only truly interesting person here is Sheen himself, who had had the world hypnotized on cheap smoky-roomed online videos during his meltdown, and yet, this sycophantic (and sometimes downright intrusive) director didn't seem to have the faith that Sheen himself could carry his own vehicle...  But since Netflix only makes personal-propaganda pieces disguised as documentaries, in the end, no matter who's being covered, you can't delve any deeper than personal promotion. Rates: **1/2

TITAN: THE OCEANGATE SUBMERSIBLE DISASTER (2025)

By the time we reach the end of TITAN, to see what the audience is waiting for... the death of the five passengers including infamous Stockton Rush... the documentary is over, which is very strange... It's not that it seemed too short, because it's a good-enough runtime and definitely holds your attention... but there must have been lawsuits pending concerning the families of the people who died. With the exception of the daughter of Mr. Titanic (the one ringer on board who knows about the fateful ship, and who was used to legitimize things)... Instead, TITAN deals with the many, many, many mistakes/misjudgements leading up to the tragedy: so that way they attempt to explain the ending with all the problems of the past... which is somewhat interesting but ultimately a cop-out... 

Also, there has never been a scarier, more formidable noise than what the submarine was making as it went further underwater... It was like Satan using a pick-axe on someone's nerve-endings... The fact that Oceangate founder/CEO Stockton Rush was able to con all these people into taking such risks is like some kind of unexplainable cult... But even THAT aspect could have been delved into further: not necessarily the good/positive aspects of Rush, but the confidence he must have had that allowed the people to be conned in the first place (from workers to investors), and for so long: It must have been more than money that brainwashed these people... many of them scientists... Instead he's a kind of nerdy impatient scientist instead of the mad scientist they're building-up... whenever he's interviewed it's a bit of a let-down... Meanwhile, since the frame-story involves his former employees in court while delving into all the near-implosions and endless testing of the submersible, what could have been totally suspense-filled, isn't... Except the scenes with actual footage of being underwater with Rush and his cohorts... from another famous wreck to The Bahamas... which has aspects of watching an underwater thriller, like The Abyss...Speaking of, there should have been (more) footage of James Cameron (or perhaps interviews with him) because he was warning people before and after the tragedy, and is far more interesting than anyone interviewed here: he'd have made a perfect Van Helsing to Rush's bloodsucking murderer... And it's very annoying and anti-climactic ending on the second-to-last run with the obnoxious "influencer" who resembles a superhero's boxer shorts... too much 11th hour time's spent on him and his fake crying-for-the-camera... So when things sum up, they literally... sum up, and quickly... Probably because everything in this case is still in red-tape limbo... perhaps Netflix should have waited a few years to make this documentary... which means, they too, like Stockton Rush, basically jumped the gun on a creation that just wasn't ready.  Rating: ***

FORD VS FERRARI (2019)

At one point in FORD VS FERRARI, at about the beginning of act three, or perhaps the end of act two, when Christian Bale wins an important race, the people who he works for are... angry that he won... So here's a feel-good underdog sport film where winning is somehow rebellious... and Bale, as usual, deep-diving into the kind of old-school neurotic character-role that used to vanish into the background, steals the show...

But unlike THE FIGHTER, it's because the other players... including Matt Damon as the man who hired him to help Ford beat Ferrari at race car driving... doesn't have much to do but spout the kind of pump-you-up cliches that fathers bring their sons to movies for (that Tommy Lee Jones could pull off sleepwalking)... And for that, for pure mainstream popcorn entertainment, this is a fun ride, and simple to grasp... but the characters are either too roguishly-endearing or one-dimensional-greedy for the plot to really work since there's never anything to anticipate, or to be completely surprised about... Meanwhile, as otherwise intense actors, Damon and Bale are doing a general-admission imitation to please the kind of Middle-American/opening-night audience they'd personally detest, and would be better suited to a story with more edge and ambiguity (though the cookie-cutter anti-corporate spin would remain the same)...  So most likely, somewhere along the way, director James Mangold decided that jovial adrenaline was better acquired without too many distractions, which has made for a beloved, popular film... But if you go back and re-watch ROCKY, HOSSIERS or THE RIGHT STUFF, you'll learn how this sort of against-the-odds vehicle can work without trying so hard to always WORK FOR the audience instead of genuinely CHALLENGING them. Rating: ***

CHEERS SEASON 1 AND PILOT EPISODE

Season 1 of Cheers relies on more than  what wound up making the show a legendary fan-favorite series... when it first started gaining high ratings and opened up beyond a small handful of critics who hoped it would go beyond the initial season, which by now, everyone has seen, but mostly in reruns... When it first aired, Cheers was the kind of show only few knew about... Having been a fan of Taxi, produced and written by many of the same people, I was tuned in from the very beginning... Going back, I had forgotten that much of what drove this season is Sam and Diane, but not the neurotic (and yes, sometimes annoying) sexual relationship that begins in Season 2...

Rather, Diane seems to be on the sidelines, constantly reminding Sam that he's not so wonderful while she, at the same time, is more flawed than anyone... In a way, this first season is a lot like Laverne & Shirley... You have a confident, sexually-active leader who makes many mistakes while being constantly checked by a nervous counterpart who's afraid to really live, and both need each other to basically survive... Also different in the first season, Norm and Cliff aren't yet Norm and Cliff, or even Cliff and Norm... Like Happy Days took a little while before Potsie and Ralph became a team, Norm's more on his own here while Cliff shows up sporadically, not yet the full-blown equal-share character, and he isn't even billed in the opening credits... And to narrow it down, this pilot is one of the great openings of TV history... Everything is shaped from within the first fifteen minutes, the only difference is that Diane is the newcomer white-rabbit leading us into her accidentally newfound wonderland, soon becoming our own... Being dumped by her fiance, she winds up where we'd be for 11 seasons, six of those without the very person who brought us here...

Sure, Cheers would improve in many ways, when it became an almost equal ensemble instead of a romantic-situation-comedy with the barflies on the side, but, then again, there's nothing like these early Coach episodes (the first two seasons especially, before he got noticeably ill in season 3)... And best yet, there's nothing quite like Season 1, before everybody knew their name. Year: 1982 Rating: ****1/2

ANOTHER SIMPLE FAVOR

Blake Lively in ANOTHER SIMPLE FAVOR Year: 2025 Rating: **

Chalk this up as one of the most unnecessary sequels ever made. The original, Paul Feig's modern-film-noir-comedy-thriller, was a nice little surprise, and worked especially during the first half as single mommy/blogger Anna Kendrick begins an investigation... 

Turning into a kind of girl-crush/lightweight-obsession with older and downright beautiful Blake Lively, providing both intrigue and suspense, and even sensuality, the only drawback being the casting of Lively's husband, who Kendrick cheats with, an actor seeming more suited to a sitcom... 

Blake Lively in ANOTHER SIMPLE FAVOR

Well he's only briefly joined by the two returning leads on a tropical island paradise... in what's more like the Knives Out sequel setting than a locale providing a logical continuation of the first film's deliberately over-bright suburbs... which director Feig served-up with an equal amount of genuine-suspense and crime-genre-satire... 

Making this new balmy location and the entire film itself a distraction to the fact that nothing really happens, as in, there's no real investigation to pull in Kendrick or the audience this time around. 

Anna Kendrick in ANOTHER SIMPLE FAVOR

THE LAST SUPPER (2025)

When you think about it, the best movies ever made, The Godfather and The Godfather 2, although loosely adapted from Shakespeare's King Lear, is very biblical in its ancient-based Italian-sourced deceptions and power struggles... And here was an opportunity for that original muse to imitate its imitator, having the two central characters, Judas and Peter, at surreptitious odds leading to the titular Last Supper, which, plot-wise, is hardly even treated like a light snack here...  

And while the acting was surprisingly decent, it was far too obvious who was who... For example, in the opening Feeding of the 500 scene: even if it were a silent film, the way one of the disciples timidly ducked his head into a shady cloak, it was obviously Judas, and he never let go of those contrived physical mannerisms, as if he were playing a junky-snitch on an episode of Kojak...

Meanwhile, Peter, while not badly cast, looking like a genuinely rugged fisherman, doesn't do enough to merit the inner-struggle he goes through during the initial prediction of the betrayal, and then the betrayal itself... It's almost like The Last Supper was trying to recreate a sort of after-game-highlights version of Mel Gibson's Passion (including the horror-trope Satan and the harshly whipped Jesus) more than narrowing itself into an effective thriller with built-in treacherous suspense straight from the source material... making the last half feel like an eternity. Grade: C—

COCAINE: ONE MAN'S SEDUCTION (1983)

David Ackroyd tells Dennis Weaver the same thing that John Kapoles would say to James Woods in THE BOOST... that they need a boost... which means cocaine... and while both that movie and this TV-movie (that came out before) both got bad reviews, they're both, well... very addictive pieces of entertainment...

Watching a hippie get high is like watching a fish swim... but seeing an otherwise conservative Willy "Death of a Salesman" Loman type blasting coke up his nose is always fun to watch, and of course quite rare, and Dennis Weaver, known for playing either tough or frantic roles, kind of balances both here...

His good wife's Karen Grassle, his good son's James Spader, his semi-wild buddy's Jeffrey Tambor and the truly wild office flirt, who introduced him to the dealer to gave him a boost, is Pamela Bellwood, so the cast is sublime... But what makes this work is the realistic arc into his addiction and how the drug is treated here: first helping his fledgling sales (the best part) until the monkey starts showing, aka, he becomes a scene: And the more Dennis does coke the more he strays from McCloud and morphs into the zany motel worker in Touch of Evil, and overall, whether soberly depressed or high as a kite or crashing like one, does a fantastic job, not overacting like he could have... meaning, he really seems high on coke, not some old actor putting us on. Rating: ****

HOW THE WEST WAS WON (TV SERIES)

James Arness's Matt Dillon killed plenty on Gunsmoke for twenty long years, and here on HOW THE WEST WAS WON the leading man's still leading but is more a character-actor in the lead: an Indian loving mountain man who hates his own people, the whites, and thinks every Indian belch is worth more white man's gold than... white man's gold...

It's a good show that, for a season and a half, plays out like a miniseries more than a series, but the best stories go to Bruce Boxleitner as the fugitive nephew whose adventures that range from a beautiful sheriff's tough daughter Elyssa Davalos to a gang of classy villains led by Richard Basehart and Tim Matheson are entertaining as it gets... But Arness's stories, including Ricardo Montalbaun as a proud Indian who, again, is better than the evil whites, are one dimensional, which doesn't mean Arness isn't good in the role. He is good. But his stories lack story and are more preaching, so it's the young man's show here, really. Years 1976-1979 Rates: ***1/2

SATURDAY NIGHT (2024)

A more fitting title of this novelty biopic would be ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE BEGINNING OF SATURDAY NIGHT with all the seemingly deliberate fiction added... And the original working title was SNL 1975 except that Howard Cossell owned the name SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE for his failed prime time comedy/variety show...

Which is how Chevy Chase, John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, Jane Curtain, Laraine Newman, Gilda Radner and Garrett Morris became the NOT ready for prime time players.... which the cast members are STILL called, and all because a sportscaster made a bad comedy show on prime time... As everyone knows, the original cast are the best... or at least the most classic and endearing... and what this movie does is take PT Anderson's multi-layered Magnolia route funneled through that movie's muse in Robert Altman's quirky ensembles Nashville and Short Cuts... And a maddened running-around it is, in real time no less, of the cast and crew preparing for the first episode of the series... Meanwhile, Dan Aykroyd, Chevy Chase and John Belushi look fantastic, and their acting is pretty good, going just a step beyond imitation... After all, it's not easy portraying a semi-modern actor (or actress) who would also star in classic movies... So basically, you have to imagine the Chevy Chase actor in Fletch, the Dan actor in Ghostbusters, the John Belushi actor in... Anyway, you get the point: but the main problem here are some of the hangups that either didn't exist or are overly exaggerated...

Garrett Morris had a problem with how he was stereotyped AFTER the show went of the air... It's doubtful he would have the same gripes BEFORE becoming famous... Also, Morris was one of the few actual actors when the show began, appearing in CAR WASH and COOLEY HIGH before the rest of them were given their own vehicles... Basically, Morris was the genuine character-actor of the show, and sadly, they turn him into an anachronism of modern politically-correct sensibilities... But he's not in the movie much, and either are the women (replaced with Lorne Michael's writer wife, who no one really knows or cares about)... And unlike some of the guys, the girls don't look anything like the originals (Jane Curtain was NOT a sexy bombshell while Newman and Radner are practically nonexistent)...

And back to the rudimentary ONCE UPON A TIME example: director Jason Reitman does to Jim Henson what Quentin Tarantino did to Bruce Lee: making him look like a dimwitted fool when he was actually very helpful and downright brilliant... Okay, so his Muppets didn't fit a late night show that was basically a grungy American barroom's version of Monty Python... more weird in its origins than outright hilarious... but that doesn't mean he would act like a total buffoon...

Andy Kaufman, meanwhile, was an offbeat guy but it's doubtful he acted like Latka Gravis from Taxi, three years before the show came out... Yes, he created the Foreign guy before, but it's doubtful he spoke that way backstage... But since the actor looks nothing like him, they probably just wanted people familiar with Taxi to know who he was in the first place... And why on earth would Milton Berle be in this movie? Just to get the otherwise great actor JK Simmons a chance to chew scenery and waste precious time? And by the third act, too much time's wasted on all the wrong characters... Berle hosted a later infamous episode that even the all-around-nice-guy and show creator Lorne Michaels has destroyed from the archives... and Michaels is one of the better characters/adaptions here...

Through Lorne we have an effective pawn to channel all the madness through... It's just too bad that that madness is so overwhelmingly hit and miss... There are some involving energetic scenes one minute, and dark dramatic brooding scenes that follow, killing any kind of character-developed momentum that would make SATURDAY NIGHT more than a smug biopic geared for mega-fan baby boomers or generation Xers... Which, thankfully, unlike the National Lampoon cable biopic A Futile and Stupid Gesture (and particularly when Michael O'Donoghue tries too hard to be condescending towards any non-hippies), this NIGHT isn't as smug as it could have been... And sometimes there's some real heart beating in here, it just needed to be a lot more steady (and meaningful) throughout. Rates: **1/2