Reviews

Hilarious from the absurd plot to the wacky characters. Don't even try to figure it out, just enjoy it from the massive shootouts where everybody misses everybody else to the explosions that always seem to go wrong. Patrick Dempsey's ridiculously compulsive genius is a man of action caught in an impossible situation without his meds.

Then there's the two hick losers who just want to rob the ATMs with bargain basement plastic explosives with instructions and cautions written in Chinese. The fact that they occasionally come out with absurdly erudite quips just makes it all the funnier.

Don't miss the surprisingly important part when they use one of the more professional crooks' laptops to pull up the FBI's most wanted list to see who's ranked higher.

I'm late to the party on Blue Bloods and streaming it to catch up. I really like the show. I like how they feature 4 generations of an Irish Catholic family that sits down to dinner as a family every Sunday (at least once an episode, sometimes twice).

Also, from a story standpoint, this episode is very satisfying, but..., to get there, they trample all over a serious subject. Usually this show is fairly good at showing both sides of an issue, even if, as natural for a family with a former and a current police commissioner, a beat cop, a police detective, and an assistant district attorney, it tilts towards a police POV.

However, in this episode, they treat diplomatic immunity as a mere nuisance. Nobody points out the reason for diplomatic immunity. If a married American female diplomat in a muslim country (with Sharia law) is raped, she would not be allowed to testify in her own defense (Women cannot testify in court). Instead of her rapist going to jail, she would be tried for adultery and sentenced to be stoned to death. THAT is why there is diplomatic immunity in order for our diplomats to function in foreign countries whose laws do not resemble ours, we grant the same privilege to their diplomats in our country.

Likewise the ending, though a good twist and poetic, is unrealistic. In reality, things would not go well for the victim that we sympathize with.

It's not egregious, just wrong. That's why I can't give this episode the endorsement that its story would otherwise merit.

One of the Christmas movies I like to revisit almost every year is Undercover Christmas. It's a neglected and deceptively good movie. At first glance, it's just another Lifetime or Hallmark Christmas movie, and some jaded critics have seen only that. What makes the movie enjoyable for repeat watching though, is the depth of its characters. Also Jamie Gertz, one of my favorite, underrated actresses.

Gertz' character plays a somewhat sl***y cocktail waitress trying to catch a rich asshole and ride off into the sunset in his limo, and Shawn Christian plays an uptight FBI agent trying to catch the asshole and his embezzling family of crooks. The plot is the standard, introduce Eliza Doolittle into the FBI agent's family of rich snobbish upper class denizens at Christmas time, and have her bring a human touch into the frozen family. But if plots were what mattered, no one would pay attention to Shakespeare who stole his mostly trashy plots from whatever trashcan he could find them in.

No, what really starts to set this movie apart is the scene where Gertz' character can't sleep and finds herself in the kitchen where Tyne Daly who plays Christian's mother is diligently preparing special dishes for the upcoming party she throws every year. Until now Daly's character has played the matron of local high society whose main interests seem to be keeping up appearances and yoking her reluctant, dysfunctional family together despite themselves. After offering to help and then admitting her complete lack of culinary skills, Gertz' character asks sincerely, "What does it take to become the person everybody depends on?"

After that, the characters start to reveal themselves beyond their surface stereotypes, and the movie acquires a much greater depth.

I know this is futile to write a review for a movie that everybody has said is absurdly bad, or maybe they said absurd AND bad, but I can't help myself because there are a few things left unmentioned.

The ?good? Parts first. If you like the idea of seeing Rachel Cook running around the Montana wilderness in sexy black lingerie, you're in luck. Don't ask why she's constantly getting (mostly) undressed in the middle of a very cold Montana, just enjoy the show.

Unlike others here, I didn't find the acting bad. There just wasn't very much of it. The first 5 minutes is basically a little Muslim girl tramping through the (supposedly) Afghanistan snow with a briefcase full of money. Silly, but scenic. The rest of the movie alternates between, look at the wonderful scenery of Montana and let's just shoot all the bad guys with magic bullets that always kill people (if you're the good guys) and always miss (if you're the bad guys). Plus there's some rock climbing, and wide angle views of Elk and a Grizzly (looks more like a brown bear to me, but never mind).

Now to the basic plot. The movie opens with Afghanis in a, presumably, opioid factory, handling a little girl a briefcase with what we're later told is 100 million dollars. Never mind that much money couldn't possibly fit in a briefcase even full of $1,000 bills. Where can you spend 100,000 thousand dollar bills? Never mind that there only 165,000 thousand dollar bills in existence. You gonna walk into a 7/11 and ask for change? The FBI would be on you like you were the Branch Davidians. OK, that's number one.

I won't even go into the idea of forcing folks out of an armored truck by pulling a flame thrower from under your hijab and--making the cab, too hot? So the crew gets out, and instead of shooting the dim bulb with the flame thrower, just crouch around shooting (and missing) a lot until they get shot.

The basic plot is taking $100 million from an opium ranch in the wilderness of Afghanistan and smuggling it into ?Canada? Via the ?United States? Sorry, in what universe does drug money flow from the source to the land of your customers? It's the drugs that flow that way. If you already had the $100 million, you wouldn't bother processing the drugs. And somehow it's easier to smuggle money into the US, and then into Canada?

I could go on, but what's the point? If you're into scenery, just turn your mind off and enjoy it. Just don't look for things to make any sense.

This is a movie without pretensions to greatness, but it's a movie that does everything right. The writing and direction merge perfectly. The soundtrack switches from funky over the title sequence to romantic to dramatic at all the right moments, always complementing but never overwhelming what's going on onscreen.

The scenes are framed perfectly like the carefully staged in the plane fight scene that switches to a view from outside the plane just long enough to make you appreciate the deft fight choreography. Then there's the scene where Cameron Diaz faints into Tom Cruises arms set against the backdrop of the fiery exploding plane in the background.

Cruise and Diaz play off each other perfectly, and Viola Davis gives her usual professional performance as the low-key chief of the spy agency.

The writing wastes nothing from the seemingly irrelevant boy scout discussion that seems to just act as light-hearted banter to frame a short exposition scene, but that turns into s significant plot point later to the hilarious discussions about winning the lottery.

The journey of Diaz' character from disoriented confused pawn to besotted and apparently betrayed love interest, to confident bad-ass is handled perfectly.

I love this movie, and then I find out it was written by Patrick O'Neill who also wrote Grosse Pointe Blank, another of my favorite movies. Now I have to find a way to watch everything he's written.

This 1986 movie is an under-appreciated gem. The acting is top notch with Dennis Quaid, Ellen Barkin, Ned Beatty, and John Goodman along with a slew of lesser known actors and actresses who play their parts perfectly. Both Barkin and Quaid consider this one of their favorite films.

Quaid is a young, handsome police lieutenant in New Orleans from a long line of New Orleans cops. Barkin is an assistant DA who is investigating police corruption. Quaid's character is an outrageous flirt and has a reputation as a playboy about town. The teasing, flirtatious dance between Barkin (Ann) and Quaid (Remy) is the hottest since Bogart and Bacall. The sexual desire and denial practically ignite the film as it rolls through the projector.

Remy is clearly the smartest cop around, and he is also involved in the phony "Widows and Orphans" fund of extorted money that the whole local police force is in on, and Ann's people catch him red-handed although he cleverly slips out of the charge. But Ann's real target is deeper than that.

The fun scenes of murder, danger, and action never let the interest lag, and none of them are of the cliché variety. The scene where Remy is on foot chasing down two killers escaping in a car down a narrow alley is typical. Instead of just getting away, the car starts to back up as fast as possible, forcing Remy to flee. Unlike many such scenes, the alley in this one is actually so long and narrow that there is obviously no place to go, and Remy resourcefully jumps up and grabs a pipe running along one of the walls, having to hoist his legs high at the last moment to avoid the car that scrapes the wall. The weaponless Ann has climbed a fence to follow and, resourcefully, tosses a loose construction brick to smash the windshield as the car exits the alley and swerves to get away. The kind of detailed, believable scene that most shows don't bother with.

Remy and Ann have some of the sexiest love scenes ever filmed. No, not sex scenes, love scenes. Watch it, and you'll know the difference. Everything is unexpected, but very real. Although the action and surprises never lag, this is a serious film with characters who go through life-changing events. Ann is ashamed when she realizes Remy's corruption after she's already slept with him. She is clearly, hurt deeply, and when Remy resorts to "kidnapping" her to get her to his extended clan's barbecue, she has a brief scene with his mother.

"Remy's a good boy," the mother says to the pretty ADA who has just unsuccessfully prosecuted him for taking bribes.

"He could be better," Ann replies.

"You gonna' try to do somethin' about that Cher?"

Short, true, and impactful. Nothing is overdramatized, but many, many of the scenes are the deeply dramatic ones any actor would kill for.

This movie was extremely well-written with matching skillful direction, a combination you rarely see. I couldn't recommend it more highly.

This episode is very intense, perhaps too much so for some, but there's no cheap tricks to heighten the drama, and no one who acts out of character no matter how deep they must reach to do what seems unimaginable to them.

This episode pushes all the buttons from butt-covering bureaucrats to doctors intimidated by the threat of lawsuits.

It confronts the issues of all involved in a very dramatic and tense way. The choices they have to make, from a young athletic man willing to lose his life rather than part with his leg until he's reassured by the unconditional love of his wife, to a pilot reluctantly forced to carry out the role of a field surgeon and cut a man's leg off. It's a job for which she is totally unprepared.

Extraordinary writing and acting.

I couldn't fairly review this whole series when I couldn't get through the first episode. I was interested enough to want to get an insight into the Rosie-the-Riveters of WWII factories to try this series. I got about halfway through the first episode, and, as you'll see, that was more than enough for me.

The first problem is that it only hints at when the story is set. The appearance of an American at a party who believes the US will never enter the war puts it in Canada, and somewhere between September 1 1939 and December 7 1941. Where the story falls in that span seems very significant. There's a huge difference between November 1939 and June of 1940, and that difference should affect every character's outlook. There's no hint of what city or part of the country the story is set in. At least none that I could pick up on. That's disorienting. No Union Jacks in the munitions factory? Guess that's Canadian understatement in contrast to American enthusiasm.

Next comes the "men are all pigs" theme, with ALL the men acting like swaggering, rude, horny high-school boys, contemptuous of any woman who has delusions of competence. Oh, except for the clueless, uncaring factory owner, and the greedy rich man who is only interested in snagging more war contracts to make him even richer. Then there's the street preacher with an incoherent message who beats his wife, even in public, and whips his innocent daughter in private. Did I forget to mention the, presumably, crippled, bitter WWI vet who constantly berates his wife for using her salary to feed them better than they ate before on his disability.

Maybe the men of the WWII era were actually ALL like that. I don't know. I wasn't alive then. I saw my share of misogyny from older male co-workers who came from that era, but it was a whole lot subtler than what's portrayed here.

Yes, I am a man, but can't I have at least one character worth rooting for? I even enjoy some well-done romance movies, but I refuse to subject myself to being repeatedly kicked in the ..., by the writers. Important marketing tip. When you start by repeatedly insulting half your audience, you're doing it wrong.

So far I've only watched the first episode, but I had to write something about this. Clearly the band is modeled after Fleetwood Mac. Not a fictional biopic, just modeled after them. Riley Keough looks, sounds, and acts like Stevie Nicks. The base of the aspiring band is the Dunn brothers not John McVie and Mick Fleetwood, and I'm pretty sure I saw a Christine McVie character coming later. But that's all just the hook to get us aging boomers.

If you enjoyed Eddie and the Cruisers or That Thing You Do, you'll love this one.

Riffing off Once Upon a Time in LA, the series inserts a ton of Easter Eggs as the Whiskey A Go-Go and The Troubadour flash in and out of the background. I love subtlety, and Daisy Jones, talking about all the songs Carole King wrote (or co-wrote) for other artists in the early 60's until she finally started her own solo career.

The drama is taking its time to evolve the characters into the successes they will become while clearly laying out the seeds of the dramatic breakup to come after they reach the pinnacle of success.

My only worry is that this will only be picked up on by aging boomers and will suffer the fate laid out for the master guitarist by the burned out producer who tells the guitarist to stop playing solos, saying nobody cares about great musicianship.

Boomers, watch it with your kids and grandkids, and tell them everything they miss.

This episode touches on so much more than most. Yes it deals with the conflict and attempts to understand each other between the characters, as usual, but it also deals with motherhood from multiple perspectives, including unwanted pregnancies, postpartum depression, and reluctance of some women to become mothers due to childhood trauma (disguised, as it frequently is, by concerns about "the state of the world").

It also shows how when police have a viable suspect that they believe they can convict, they want to stop looking. There's the strong and potentially justified tendency to think that looking for alternatives when you have enough evidence for the jury is just helping the defense get a suspect off in court later.

It also deals with various perspectives on fatherhood, from Booth's desire to be more of a father to his son while the mother wants to have her own life without Booth, to another father's fears since he is a self-confessed bad man.

That's a lot of issues to cover in under an hour while still giving us a very entertaining mystery. One of their best.

We Love You, Sally Carmichael is hilarious, outrageous, heartfelt. The first half is funny in an uncomfortable kind of way, and the last half more than delivers. I couldn't stop laughing. I nearly fell out of my chair during the final interview he gives. More fun than you should be able to have in an hour and a half. It's got everything, nerdy failed author who becomes best selling pseudonymous sell-out and hates it, smarmy publishers, one considerably crazy actor, and a bunch of normal people who actually like Simon.

Watch carefully and you'll see that despite Simon's hatred and disgust at his alter ego, ordinary people's lives have been altered for the better by what he considers total schlock.

My only question is how did Christopher Gorham go from nerdy Jake Foley in Jake 2.0 to badass blind hunk Augie Anderson in Covert Affairs and back to nerdy Simon Heath/Sally Carmichael in a few short years. That's some special acting.

Find this movie! Watch this movie!

BTW I should also call out for approval director Christopher Gorham's very effective use of texting. He doesn't try to display a screenshot of the phone. It's always too hard to read those. Instead he just overlays the relevant text responses in a cartoon-like bubble. Best way of handling this type of thing that I've seen.

The writing on this episode is totally top notch. The subtle villainy of Dr. Duchamp, pretending to befriend Lily while stabbing her in the back and knowing Jordan will get the blame is a true archvillain move.

Pushing Jordan and Macy to their limits to find the truth and do the right thing at the same time is brilliantly done in this episode including the grudging respect the DA is forced to give the man whose job she is trying to undermine.

A prison guard at an execution is appalled to see a lethal injection botched with the condemned thrashing in agony for over 20 minutes. The guard finally enters the chamber and shoots the condemned man in the head.

Then the state charges the guard with murder! For shooting a condemned man in the process of an attempted execution! That's just too stupid for words. Yes, he would have gotten fired, but it WAS an execution of a legally condemned man.

Yes, that allows Denny to save the day by inspiring Sack to turn the case around with a clever twist, but we're really supposed to believe that the state charged a man with murder for carrying out a legally sanctioned execution even if in an illegal way?

The writers aren't even trying. With constant verbal winks that break the 4th wall by reminding us this is the last season, they're apparently in it just for the jokes and the paycheck.

They're really just phoning it in with this last season. The sperm bank plot is resolved in a way any simpleton would have thought of the instant the problem presented itself.

Even if it allowed the characters to rant about a current issue, they really should have tried harder to make it plausible.

It really doesn't make much sense to review each episode since it takes all 8 episodes to tell the story of the first Reacher novel. Although they gave Lee Child's first novel the full LOTR treatment, using almost 7 hours, it didn't feel bloated. They followed the book very faithfully (at least from my memory), but, despite the long running time, didn't have to pad it.

They combined the 2 barbers into the one who mattered, and skipped a side-trip where Reacher actually did learn something about Blind Blake. They modified the circumstances of the ending only slightly, in a way I won't relate for fear of spoiler. A good change I think. Other than that, I can't think of anything either left out or added. It may be that some of the flashbacks to Reacher's background came from other books, but I can't remember. They were certainly all relevant, character-revealing, and short.

The casting was mostly spot-on. I think Maria Sten played Sgt. Neagley to perfection. No, Alan Ritchson is not Tom Cruise, (who is?), but he actually is 6'5" and built like a tank instead of Cruise's up-armored Volkswagen . Reacher's not a character requiring Laurence Olivier's acting talents. Malcom Goodwin was great as Finlay, as was Willa Fitzgerald as Roscoe, and Bruce McGill always brings his best to any role.

The plot/mystery is also good fun, but I'm so familiar with the book that I really didn't notice since I knew it all already. More to enjoy if you haven't read the book.

If you enjoy thrillers, westerns, or their ilk, you'll love this Reacher incarnation. If you like a good story with a character who grows or is conflicted, look elsewhere. Drawing from his European roots, Child calls Reacher the Knight Errant. To those of us raised in the US., he's the lone stranger who rides into town, sets things right, and rides off into the sunset.

The only downside is by taking 8 episodes to film each novel, we'll all be in our graves by the time they catch up with with Child's now 27 novels.

I usually write on the merits of the writing, but the nonsensical false history portrayed in this episode is too much. The "Amalia Rose" is supposed to be a slave ship that sank while transporting African slaves to America "150 years ago". That would be 1860, just before the Civil War. The United States outlawed the slave trade in 1807 (before England's law, but due to constitutional issues, it went into effect slightly after England's law). There were no slave ships shipping Africans in chains in 1860. Furthermore all the carefully catalogued slaves have Christian names, not African names. If somebody wanted a show talking about the evils of slavery, they needed to do better. This kind of nonsense just undermines the theme by turning a serious evil into some kind of imaginary cartoon history.

I love this show and usually accept the scientific explanations voiced by the actors without bothering to see if they are accurate. I hope the science is much more accurate than the history.

By far the worst episode of the show.

This episode is hilarious and touching. It pushes all the right buttons: Bones' bizarre over-rationality, Booth's integrity, even Hodgins' crazy and hilarious experiment which ends up being one of the keys to solving the case. It shows both Booth's and Bones' touching trust in each other in ways both uncomfortably laugh-inducing and touching.

I feel it's unfair to downgrade a brilliant episode because it was seemingly ignored in the overall series' continuity.

I usually don't bother reviewing movies with so many reviews already. What's the point? But, although everybody's pointed out the big good things, I want to focus on the subtlety.

The scene with Jane and Aubrey talking by the pool for the first time is awesome. Jane's shallowness isn't really over the top, and she also points out the good things she knows about Dave like how he treats his kid sister. The payoff is when Aubrey starts to try to sell Jane on Dave's value as a love interest, but forces herself to awkwardly stop, realizing that Jane is never going to be enough for Dave, and that she'd rather have him.

Aubrey's parents are portrayed as forcing her to grow up too fast by being too unwilling to be a big part of her life, but not melodramatically, just by trusting her in too much of a hands-off way. The scene where Aubrey finally seriously opens up to her parents in an awkward, teen-age, detail-free way, and they start to realize that she really has grown up is enough to make any parent cry.

The movie never goes for the easy out. Great film-making Mr. Kasdan!

Extraordinarily well done. The writing is wonderful. The acting is perfect. The directing is imaginative. A much more real portrayal of what many veterans go through. TV and movies tend to only show overly dramatic cases of vets with PTSD rather than the more subdued but very difficult transition many of them face. The scene where Spence literally sheds his past and his armor as he accepts his heartbreak while walking "through the fire" to Gary Clark Jr.'s song will stay with me for a long time. It doesn't end there though :).

Subtle writing is good writing, but needs the audience to pay careful attention. I completely understand the parent who reviewed this movie worrying that people will come away thinking the character Sally is autistic and that her recovery is something to give false hope to the suffering. That's not what the movie says, but those who don't pay close attention may come away thinking that. The differences between the condition of Sally and those who are profoundly autistic are highlighted in the movie. Several characters point it out.

The true crux of the movie is the mother's insistence on denying her and her children's grief over the accidental death of her husband, their father. It's clear that Sally is trying to work through the loss that her mother won't let her acknowledge, and doing it in a unique way suited to a 6-year-old polyglot and artistic savant. You have to pay attention to realize that though. If you prefer the hysterical melodrama of Ordinary People, well, bless you heart, but I prefer the more subtle and realistic treatment the psychology gets here. The scene where Sally imitates the chameleons that are understatedly shown during the opening credits is priceless!

Enjoy melodramas, soap operas and CGI extravaganzas if you like, but please bring your full attention to this movie and you will walk away satisfied and a little wiser.

Preposterous premise and superb acting. If you enjoy intelligent people speaking and acting like intelligent people while getting into funny situations, you'll love this one. No fart jokes, no overacting, just funny situations, and poorly socialized characters trying to navigate a meaningful relationship.

Example: the hitman hugs the female lead after sneaking into her apartment, and she asks, "Is that a gun in your pocket, or are you glad to see me?" after we've just seen him stuff a gun in his pocket in the previous scene. Subtle, but funny as hell, and they don't belabor it.