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—

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: ***

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

MAESTRO (2023)

Fifty minutes into Bradley Cooper's MAESTRO, his directorial and starring-role biopic of composer Leonard Bernstein, he's discussing a possible book written about all his accomplishments, from teaching children on television to his best remembered work, West Side Story...

And yet we never got to witness any of it, instead  listening to he and classy wife Felicia Montealegre (a put-upon Carey Mulligan) within an intellectually-rambling romance from picnics to parties (in-between sporadic bisexual trysts) and not much else about the man that Cooper seems to have more fun portraying as a flamboyant and sophisticated, British-mannered, chain-smoking proto-beatnik than celebrating the legendary musical genius built right into the title... And aesthetically Cooper's cinematic influences... from LENNY to RAGING BULL to CAPOTE... are on full avant-garde display but with nothing behind it, really, except mere window dressing... with tinted glass. Grade: D

GYPSY (NETFLIX SERIES)

Year: 2017
Rates: ****1/2

This original Netflix series has had very negative comments and reviews and is now dead as dishwater, with no second season to continue GYPSY, which was falsely promoted as a kind of thriller, or something...

But it's actually the sexiest and in that, most lustfully suspenseful show that ever dealt with bisexual women... Or what some refer to as "lipstick lesbians." Because that's really all this is about, and everything else is merely background... wallpaper...

While Naomi Watts is a pretty older woman, Sophie Cookson is perhaps THE most beautiful young actress that ever lived... and there have been quite a few... living and dead...

The basic premise is that Watts, a married shrink, goes behind her patients' backs, tooling around with the people in their lives they'd shared about in private AND legal confidentiality. And yet, what everything really boils down to is when Watts and Cookson (the wild ex of melancholy young male patient) will eventually connect i.e. hook up. When they do, it's unfathomably awesome. But is nothing compared to the repressed longing that occurs for the first five episodes to reach that point, so, if you're into this kind of thing... GYPSY, although no longer a series, can now be referred to as an extremely sexy and genuinely sensual 10-hour older-younger lesbian movie.