THE LOCUST EATERS (BRITISH TELEVISION)

One of those shows that doesn't work the way it's supposed to, but is still pretty good in a laidback, kind of neo noirish, hangout fashion... The overall plot is that Wanda Ventham is a sleeper agent married to born loser Ian Hendry, which is, as revealed in the pilot episode, an arranged marriage by her agency so that... well... that's the problem: What should be Wanda's series has almost nothing to do with her, or her former/present occupation... Meanwhile Ian Hendry, a fantastic character actor perhaps best remembered as Michael Caine's arch rival in GET CARTER, is treated here like's... Michael Caine, ironically.. with every woman throwing themselves at him when he's a balding midlife crisis...

What THE LOTUS EATERS really is is a kind of proto version of THE LOVE BOAT combined with FANTASY ISLAND... the first because each episode has visitors in which the bar-owning couple try helping out; the latter since it's filmed in the fantastical land of Greece... A nice balmy location providing a CASABLANCA vibe, had Rick and Isla stayed together only to be tempted away by every and any half decent arrival... For Wanda it's the same British spy who provided her all the expository dialogue for the audience to know her espionage alter ego (loaded with B&W flashbacks seeming out of a kitchen sink thriller)... their relationship is liken to a daytime soap... while his May/September trysts are more like nighttime male fantasy melodramas... The nicest pleasure is seeing gorgeous future ANGELS nurse Karan David (pictured) as a young precious barmaid... the best to look at despite revolving guest beauties like Anouska Hempel and Suzan Farmer... But isn't that what any British TV series is about... the birds? Years: 1972-1973 Rating: ***1/2

CAREER OPPORTUNITIES (1991)

In one scene thirty-minutes into John Hughes's CAREER OPPORTUNITIES, made during his career midlife crisis between teenage and adult comedies, gorgeous brunette dream girl Jennifer Connelly, standing in the central Target store location late at night, hours after closing, asks fast-talking star Frank Whalley: "What are you doing here?" Wherein he answers, "I work here." 

Probably the most coherently logical reply by a character so zany and over-confident, you can see how great Matthew Broderick was in Hughes's FERRIS BUELLER'S DAY OFF just for not having to try so hard to be so likable... Whalley plays the rambling village idiot in a small town (Hughes's class envy spouted throughout), looked down upon by adults and "up upon" by three children who have no purpose but following Whalley around like puppy dogs, and it's impossible to understand what has them so captivated... The audience sure isn't, and wasn't: this was one of John's biggest bombs, and Whalley only played third or fourth bananas afterwards... However, there IS a purpose, a kind of exploitation element for CAREER, and it's twofold: the first being the mere casting of Connelly, who was truly gorgeous enough to put into a movie for being truly gorgeous enough to be IN that movie, especially the trailers (to get young men into the theaters)... but having no real plot-line doesn't help matters... Also, other than being NOT ONLY an endorsement for something that was pretty new at the time, the superstore experience... but it's a worthwhile location and somewhat of a dream job, working at a Target store, late at night and all alone, with literally everything at your fingertips... But there needed to be a better character besides "the town liar" to base a comedy romp on, beyond a stunning girl and final act keystone-criminal break-in trope that would have fared a lot more successfully in... well... HOME ALONE ring a bell? For John Hughes, who wrote and didn't direct either, this was an OPPORTUNITY for a big endorsement and to attempt making his FERRIS persona grown up... but that guy was a lot cooler, smarter, more mature and far more entertaining than this guy... Basically, watching Matthew Broderick wander around alone in a tiny dimestore would have beaten this turkey. Rating: **

ANACONDA (2025)

In the comedy Be Kind: Rewind, Jack Black and his sidekick make homemade movies to replace real ones, which is exactly what happens here, only in this case, the two comic actors are usually the comic leads: so each one is each other's equal sidekick, basically... or something...

While Jack does his usual thing, including singing beautifully as if he's making fun of beautiful singing because it's a surprise he sings so beautifully in the first place, Paul Rudd is basically playing Paul Rudd, only he looks older than usual, painted with a strange spray tan... perhaps intentional... And when they were kids they made Super 8 horror movies (trope city), and for nostalgia they go to the Amazon to film a remake of the cult classic Anaconda since Rudd, as a loser D-rate extra-actor, acquires the rights to the 1990's film, which makes no sense... What results is a semi-meta slog where one minute the group (including two ladies, of course, including young and hot Daniela Melchior) are trying to stay out of actual trouble (the usual THREE AMIGOS "this is real" device that most people credit to TROPIC THUNDER), and the next they're acting in their movie-within-a-movie that, who knows, might have turned out more interesting had the actual movie been their own fake movie... As in, it could have been worse, more fun to bag on, which this otherwise mediocre sendup of a sendup needs to be... To be anything at all, that is, if so-bad-it's-good movies like Anaconda are what they were really after anti-celebrating. Or something.

SPIDER-NOIR (2026)

For the last decade, Nicolas Cage has been in a never-ending cycle of "almost comeback" status: Every single movie that comes out are said to be game-changing roles... Here's another; following the original voice-over for the surprise Spiderverse hit that featured Spider-Noir as a side-character, now he's the Live-Action focal-point: A full-blown attempt to combine the old 1940's gumshoe device into modern times: and frankly, it doesn't always work... While always a cool cat on screen, Cage is too old now, and his voice, his narration needed for the typical pulpy cadence, is faltering and not edgy like it should be... Had this been 2010 Cage, it might work...

The special effects, like a villain with a face lighting on fire, is not only too CGI, but takes away from what's attempting a more hands-on/old-school approach... Within such an otherwise antique forum, the expensive special effects simply stand out too much... And the overall timing is mostly off (and fans of Spider-Man in general would not last 10 minutes watching those classic movies, or anything made before the 1990's, and they probably think that Christopher Nolan invented Noir): Cage's Girl Friday secretary over-acts and seems part of a sit-com; the femme-fatales are too breathy and hissy and cornball... And the several culprits (like the usual crooked politician) are too modernized to seem like the Golden Age of Hollywood story-telling that Spider-Noir sometimes tries too hard to replicate, while seeming awkwardly burdened from bringing something old to something new... Overall, despite the nice look and some neat thrills, the time period that should enhance the series is ultimately more of a story-structure bulwark. Basically, Spider-Noir worked best as the best character in an ensemble than when given his own picture. Episode 1 Rating: **

RISE OF THE RED HOT CHILI PEPPERS: OUR BROTHER, HILLEL

Hillel Slovak and Cliff Martinez in TOUGH GUYS Documentary Date 2916 Rating: ****

At the end of THE RISE OF THE RED HOT CHILI PEPPERS: OUR BROTHER, HILLEL, both lead singer Anthony Keidis and bassist Flea say that people won't forget original lead guitarist and co-founder Hillel Slovak... 

Which would actually be impossible, because no matter what era of the band you listen to, his colorful punk/funk strumming fervor sustained with initial replacement Jack Sherman and eventual semi-permanent replacement John Frusciante, who's 11th hour praise of the late guitarist is one of the most beautiful interviews in any rock doc, punctuating how much of an influence the late funky player was... he set the pattern of the band's sound forever...

Hillel Slovak and the Red Hot Chili Peppers in TOUGH GUYS

And yet, beginning in a kind of old school prog-rock band, we never really learn how Slovak went from that 1970's chunky power-chord rock sound to the new wave techno sound of his in-between band What Is This to the funk-filled discovery of what glued the band together... 

That's most likely because he had passed away after their third album (HIS second with the band), and what's left are sporadic diary entries and a few words from his former girlfriend (a widow of sorts) and a lookalike brother... But mostly this doc centers on both Kiedis and Flea about how the band formed, and it all began with seeing Slovak playing in that band in high school... before either were musicians, or even wanted to be...

Hillel Slovak and the Red Hot Chili Peppers in TOUGH GUYS

Then kind of wisping through the beginning stages of the band's formation that included hanging out and getting stoned... which inevitably leads to a few rushed recollections of drug abuse by band members... Which isn't bad since things don't drag or get too wordy or preachy or melodramatic... nor does the doc rely on that kind of new author-intrusive device of the interviewees pretending to be shocked about something revealed by the interviewer...

The only genuine perspective comes from the two survivors of a band that blew up after a decade of LA nightclub punk-rock beginnings shown in a collage of interesting artwork and just enough music for what's both a tribute and testament.

Hillel Slovak and the Red Hot Chili Peppers in TOUGH GUYS

Hillel Slovak and the Red Hot Chili Peppers in TOUGH GUYS with Flea and Anthony Kiedes

Hillel Slovak and the Red Hot Chili Peppers in TOUGH GUYS with Flea and Anthony Kiedes

Hillel Slovak and the Red Hot Chili Peppers in TOUGH GUYS with Flea and Anthony Kiedes

Hillel Slovak and the Red Hot Chili Peppers in TOUGH GUYS

Hillel Slovak and the Red Hot Chili Peppers in TOUGH GUYS

 

HARLEM NIGHTS (1989)

According to the trivia for Eddie Murphy's time-period gangster flick HARLEM NIGHTS, the humor on set between himself, Richard Pryor, Redd Foxx and Della Reese were funnier than anything in the movie... That's more than trivia, it's an outright admission that NIGHTS suffers from being too complicated a plot for these comic actors to be able to pull off their characters while at the same time, being funny...

In BEVERLY HILLS COP, the fact that Eddie Murphy's best friend was murdered meant nothing during scenes when he would, for example, argue with a hotel manager about getting a room, or argue even harder with employees at a warehouse about why he's snooping around... There aren't many pockets within the rather cliche old-school gangster flick involving gangsters and crooked cops wanting to move in on the main characters (THE GODFATHER ring a bell?) for comedy geniuses like Pryor, Murphy or Foxx to do their thing... Being constantly stuck within the story, HARLEM NIGHTS is as claustrophobic to the audience as it was to the actors... a shame since there are some worthwhile moments and potential to be had... But Murphy was obviously over his head, mainly as director... His timing was off in both the performance and cadence/timing of the overall picture... So John Landis would have been a far better choice to put everyone else's pressure off Murphy so he can shine: see COMING TO AMERICA, another Eddie Murphy production, for all the proof you'll need...Or watch Ted Demme's LIFE, set during the same era only taking place in prison, and with a dream sequence involving a similar nightclub and you'll see that Murphy's juggling too many plates to serve-up a satisfying main course. Rates: **1/2

THE HUNTING WIVES (2025)

The Stepford Wives meets Twin Peaks meets The L Word  meets Desperate Housewives meets A Simple Plan (and some Gypsy, another Netflix series, thrown in)... About rich Texas Republicans who use every cliche (and red state reference) in the book, which is obviously overly deliberate, and thankfully the characters thaw out of their formidable shells into seeming more human than hackneyed... With a frame story about a gorgeous blonde teenage cheerleader whose death rocks the town, straight from that famous David Lynch series, but THE HUNTING WIVES isn't really ironical or weird, just extremely sexual...

The two main characters are Malin Akerman and Brittany Snow: one's older and hot and confident; the other's shy and mousy-cute, looks 22 when she's 40... Their lesbian romance is so overly hinted at and teased, there's not the necessary tension in their inevitable hooking up... Overall, despite the high-class-suburban conservative setting, things are so sensuously liberal that there's really no shock value in the nighttime soap opera elements... it's like lighting up a fuse that's already sizzling... But these two ladies are good enough in their opposites-attract attraction to keep the pulpy/page-turning (eventually neo-noir inspired) cadence worthwhile. Rating: ***1/2

SEAN COMBS: THE RECKONING (2025)

Here's yet another Netflix documentary with four parts that should have been two, as there's simply too much time spent on interviews with particular people suing Sean Combs... Each episode has at least one or two people being interviewed about a lawsuit and what led up to the lawsuit...

The problem is, these long stretches of repetitive allegations simply gets in the way of an otherwise intriguing documentary about the rise of a supposed music icon who's definitely a music mogul... It's one thing to have a frame story that, in this case, is self-shot footage of Combs in the nervous days leading up to his arrest: But there are multiple frames here and there needed only that one...

The most interesting episode is the third, after piggybacking on what seems more a Suge Knight/Tupac biopic... when Puffy rises as a contrived phoenix from the ashes of his biggest act, Notorious BIG, meets Cassie Ventura, and begins a downward drug-fueled spiral... But then we're tortured with twenty-minutes of more allegations... from a male "sex worker" (who's not very attractive) saying (without proof) that he slept with Cassie AND Diddy, which segues into a studio musician in the final episode accusing him of rape... All these bulwarks might be important on paper since the court case is the elephant in the room, but they simply ruin the overall flow here as a documentary with way too many cooks and conspiracies. Grade: C—

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