Bridesmaids Fits Easily Into Best Comedy Movies of All-Time

Bridesmaids fits easily into my list of "top 60 funniest movies" of all time, all of which are five-star classics.

The thing that stands out about it is that a buddy-girl film like this has never been attempted, or at least has never worked. Kristen Wiig shines with all the promise she has displayed in recent years on Saturday Night Live, but never fully captured at the box office.

Wiig plays the maid of honor who just isn't very good at wedding planning. The best scenes happen when the girls disgustingly pick out their wedding dresses, take a messy flight to their Vegas bachelorette party, and are entertained at Maya Rudolph's wedding by a certain female trio from the 90s.

Melissa McCarthy as Megan is a highlight as the chunky and spunky sister of the groom. She's full of bad ideas, like when she flirts in flight with an air marshall (played by her real-life husband). Jon Hamm, Mad Men's Don Draper, is also delectable in a different kind of sleazy way from his TV character.

***** out of ***** stars

Great Newspaper Reads: Eddie Murphy makes #2 on my list of favorite Saturday Night Live players

In honor of Eddie Murphy’s upcoming Netflix movie Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F, The New York Times makes him this subject of The Interview this weekend.

Here are the highlights:

• When Murphy joined Saturday Night Live in 1980, the show was thought to be on the verge of cancellation. His memorable characters like Mr. Robinson, Gumby, Mr. White, Buckwheat, and James Brown contributed significantly to making me a life-long SNL fan.
• Murphy knew around age 13 or 14 that he would become famous.
• 1987’s Eddie Murphy: Raw remains the top-grossing standup-comedy movie ever.
• His look in that movie and also what he wore everywhere around that time was influenced by Elvis.
• He met Richard Pryor on a plane and gave him a cassette of his first album. Sitting a few rows away, he could see the back of Pryor’s head and that he was laughing. “I could have died right there,” he says.
• Murphy says he’s never seen a better comic than Pryor or a better actor than Charlie Chaplin.
• Most people likely know him from his movies, although SNL is by far his high water mark for me. That said, Beverly Hills Cop and 48 Hrs. are classic comedies. 
• After 48 Hrs., Marlon Brando called to see if Murphy would have dinner with him. Brando told him acting was bullshit and that anyone could do it, naming “that kid” Clint Eastwood - one of my all-time favorites - as someone he couldn’t stand.
• He doesn’t drink and he turned down participating when Robin Williams and John Belushi would hang out with him while doing coke. Murphy said he smoked weed but not that much and not until his first time at age 30.
• He thought there was plenty of racism directed against him over the years. One that he points out in the interview is when David Spade made a reference on SNL to Murphy’s career being in free fall. Murphy said hearing that from his own people at the show was a cheap shot and somewhat racist. That said, he’s cool these days with Spade and SNL mastermind Loren Michaels.
• He calls Pluto Nash his worst movie.
• He describes himself as so out of touch these days that he can’t even name a single Taylor Swift song.
• His ideal day sounds a lot like mine: sit around and not do much other than play guitar and hear the kids somewhere playing around. 

Not an easy task, but I'll add my all-time 10 favorite SNL cast members (not based on what else they have done in the careers, just based off their SNL output):

10. Gilda Radner

09. Mike Myers

08. Will Ferrell

07. Steve Martin (regular guest)

06. Adam Sandler

05. Bill Murray

04. Martin Short

03. Chevy Chase (with just one season!)

02. Eddie Murphy

01. Chris Farley

The right way and the wrong way to bring Girl Power

I just watched two very different, I suppose you could call them, "girl power" movies - one whose role in history played a major role in the advancement of women and is excellent and the other that played no role in the advancement of women and arguably almost brings them stooping down to the level of the male part of the species.

Before there was Barbie, there was Greta Gerwig's 2019 adaptation of Little Women. Based on the classic novel published in 1868 by Louisa Mae Alcott (I'm just realizing that somehow I've never read any of her other works), at first glance, this remake might seem unnecessary since the 1994 version starring Winona Ryder was so excellent.

But along with Gerwig as an awesome director who creatively plays with the story's timeline, the six-time-Oscar-nominated movie is essential because of the cast. Saoirse Ronan and Timothée Chalamet are clearly among the top talents in Hollywood today, likeably playing the roles earlier perfected by Ryder and Christian Bale. When Meryl Streep, Emma Stone, Laura Dern, Bob Odenkirk, and Florence Pugh are relegated to supporting actors, you know a film might be great. 

Little Women is set just after the Civil War, as young people finally get the chance to throw out some of their worries and focus on good times. This means, for most young women, falling in love with a suitable future husband. But Jo, played by Ronan, is conflicted about this and is committed to being alone and chasing her dream of being a novelist. The movie's release was delayed by the Covid pandemic, which ironically must have felt a lot like the time during the Civil War for young people in stunting their development.

5 out of 5 stars

Now we fall to the other end. Other than the cool ending that reveals who the new Charlie is (the old one has passed away), Charlie’s Angels: The IMAX 2-D Experience, also from 2019, is a high-glitz, low-intelligence stinker. I suppose a case could be made for the Elizabeth Banks-directed production as eye-candy entertainment, but life is a little too short. How the otherwise wise-decision-making Kristen Stewart got attached to this as one of the Angels is what offers the true suspense. Yuck. 

1.5 out of 5 stars.

Unfrosted tells a lovable origin story of the Pop Tart wars

The unhealthy diets and tummy aches of the Civil War-era led a drive to culinary innovation, and by baking water and graham flour, Dr. James Caleb Jackson of New York was able to create the first breakfast cereal, Granula. 

From there, a Seventh Day Adventist in Battle Creek, Michigan named John Harvey Kellogg set about making “ready-to-eat cereals widely available at grocery stores.” Kellogg called his formula Granola. Creative, eh? By 1902 there were 40 cereal manufacturers in Battle Creek, including Grape-Nuts, Grape-Nut Flakes, Shredded Wheat, and Toasted Corn Flakes.

For more on cereal history, I highly recommend The Great American Cereal Book and also T.C. Boyle’s The Road to Wellville from 1993, which I somehow haven’t read yet.

The evolution of breakfast was on my mind when I watched Jerry Seinfeld’s new movie Untoasted - an Austin Powers-like, star-studded, rapid-fire, candy-colored comedy on Netflix. Jerry plays a Mad Man-like exec at Kellogg's in 1963 in, yes, Battle Creek who is doing battle indeed with Amy Schumer's Post to be the first to land on a pastry that will take kids' minds off always eating nothing but cereal for breakfast. Which company will get what we've come to know as Pop Tarts into the hands of the most kids?

The cast of characters is not only an endless stream of stars, but Jerry equips them with really funny material. Melissa McCarthy and Jim Gaffigan shine on the Kellogg's team, as does Hugh Grant as an extremely strange Shakespearean Tony the Tiger, Christian Slater as the head of the evil milkmen syndicate, Bill Burr as a sexually debauched President Kennedy, Mikey Day as the leader of the Snap Crackle and Pops, Kyle Dunnigan as Walter Cronkite and Johnny Carson, and John Slattery and Jon Hamm as ad men.

The movie doesn't get great reviews and, while it is a lot of eye candy to handle, I really like it and think it's the kind of thing - because its bowl is so overflowing with jokes - that might actually be good to watch a few times.

4.5 out of 5 stars

BONUS: When I recorded Avalanche on Fubo, I didn't really know what I was going to get. I thought it might be a high-school movie along the lines of Porky's or Hot Dog: The Movie. But instead it's a melodramatic disaster flick from 1978. Bad as it is, I couldn't take my eyes off it because it's a Roger Corman production, which means just off-kilter and weird enough - and bad enough - to be good. Mia Farrow attends her ex-husband Rock Hudson's ski-resort opening. Robert Forster tries to warn them that the resort is in an environmentally unstable location. They get into a three-way relationship and the whole thing is a big mess. The movie, filmed in Colorado, cost a ton to create and bombed at the box office. 2.5 out of 5 stars.

Bottoms reaches comedy-weird deep to become the new Wet Hot American Summer

Have you ever wondered what high school might be like if everyone said out loud exactly what everyone was thinking? 

No? Me neither. But that doesn’t stop Bottoms, on Amazon Prime, from trying to tell such a story. And it's a pretty outrageous coming-of-age, high-school movie.

Fans of The Bear who are sick of waiting for Season 3 later this summer will especially want to enjoy Ayo Edebiri's performance as a loser lesbian supposedly fresh out of juvie. Her comedy timing and facial gestures are every bit as strong here as in her TV smash hit.

Rachel Sennott co-stars as a wackier version of the same character she played in 2021's Shiva Baby (which isn't surprising since Emma Seligman directed both films; that one was good but this one is better). 

Perhaps best of all is teacher Marshawn Lynch of pro-football fame as a lazy and porn-distracted teacher who agrees to sponsor the girls' fight club as a way to protect themselves from the nasty and unually effeminate football jocks. The girls are able to get the club going under the guise of female empowerment, but, in true dirty-teen-comedy form, all they really start it for is to have a chance at sex with cheerleaders.

I was trying to put my finger on what this film reminded me about, but then I read a Seligman quote in which she described Bottoms as a "campy queer high-school comedy in the vein of Wet Hot American Summer but more for a Gen-Z queer audience." 

Anything described to be like Wet Hot American Summer (my 34th favorite movie of all time), count me. 

4.5 out of 5 stars

Hit Man shows that Richard Linklater can straddle the line of mainstream and independent

I've long espoused the mastery of Richard Linklater, who I now place as my third-favorite movie director behind Alfred Hitchcock and Quentin Tanrantino. And while his latest, Hit Man on Netflix, is not his greatest, it's about as entertaining of a new release as you'll find, offering fun for both rom-com and action-crime fans (and it has a 97% on Rotten Tomatoes).

I just reviewed another Glen Powell movie, Anyone But You, but Hit Man (along with 2016's Everybody Wants Some!!) really proves that this man is a star. He pulls off the Fletch-like task of changing into multiple characters in order to transform as a univeristy professor into a guy who disguises himself as a hit man for the New Orleans police in order to catch people before they are able to kill. Further, Powell wrote the script with Linklater.

What I wrote about Boyhood, my favorite movie of 2014, still holds:

If you're a fan of Linklater's other classics like Dazed and Confused, School of Rock, Before Sunrise, Slacker, Fast Food Nation, and Bernie, then you will surely think this is brilliant.

The director is usually more daring than he is with Hit Man. There was the 12-year real-life span of making Boyhood, the adult-focused animation of Waking Life, and the all-in-one-day story of the "Before" trilogy. He sticks with a strong focus on dialogue, which keeps it in the "independent" realm but still makes Hit Man his most mainstream movie ever. It works.

4.5 out of 5 stars

Joaquin Phoenix's depiction of Napoleon is one for the ages

While there is plenty of great stuff to see on Apple TV, there is also a lifetime’s worth elsewhere. So I cancelled my subscription upon completing 2023's Napoleon - a great way to go out with a bang.

Joaquin Phoenix has built a legend with some of the greatest performances in modern film, including The Joker, Her, Walk the Line, Quills, and The Master. He is the perfect Napoleon Bonaparte and this movie touches nicely on the French leader's major war battles and personal conflicts. It could have equally been a 10-episode TV series to fill in many more of the endlessly interesting details of his life.

Here are some of the things depicted in the movie that everyone high-school age and over should know about Napoeon Bonaparte:

• The film's story opens in 1789, with Marie Antoinette getting beheaded for her sympathies to the supposed enemies of France. This welcomed in the famed Reign of Terror. 
• Napoleon Bonaparte is in the crowd to witness the beheading. He is a young ambitious soldier from Corsica who is promoted after an impressive raid of the British at Toulon.
• He marries Joséphine de Beauharnais, who had been locked up as part of the Reign, and they have a robust sex life but can't conceive children. They also are not faithful to each other. (More than 41,000 prisoners were released at the end of The Reign of Terror.)
• As the tables turn and the French Royalists are rounded up, the former prisoners and people like Napoleon move into the mansions of Paris.
• The Battle of Austerlitz is a key exhibit of Napoleon's strategic genius, as he lures the Austrian emenies into a trap that backs them onto a frozen lake where Napoleon annihilates them.
• In 1812, Napoleon invaded Russia, only to find Moscow vacated in the dead of winter. Moscow burns, but France retreats, having lost an astouding amount of its military - estimated at more than half a million French dead.
• The failure in Russia causes the first of his exiles, with the powers that be shipping him off to the island of Elba. 
• After he sweet talks his way back into leadership, an epic Battle of Waterloo scene unfolds, which is actually the beginning of the end for Napoleon. After Joséphine has already succumbed to pneumonia (after their divorce), he also dies in another exile on the island of Saint Helena in 1821 - soon after witnessing an ominous fly in his drink.
• The movie notes that nearly 3 million people died in Napoleon's wars.

Whether he was a great man or something else, it seems difficult to tell - certainly from this movie. But it is great cinema. I loved it, and if you want some historical fiction with love, war, and more, you should watch it. Napoleon left me wanting to know lots more than I currently do about this wildly fascinating time in human history.

4.5 out of 5 stars

Elvis turned in a strong acting performance in Flaming Star, a Western set in the 1800s

I was listening to a podcast recently with Quentin Tarantino discussing the films that had influenced him at an early age and I was surprised to hear him speak so glowingly about a movie starring Elvis Presley.

Of course I love "Suspicious Minds," "In the Ghetto," Don't Be Cruel," and many other Elvis songs, but I never found his movies much worth discussing. I recently switched my streaming live TV from Sling to Fubo and I was excited that Tarantino's suggestion, Flaming Star, from 1960, is available there. I really enjoyed it and it's easy to see the similarities with Tarantino's work (incidentally, he's my favorite director behind Alfred Hitchcock).

It may be a little nonsensical, but, in the movie, you never want to utter the sentence “I saw the flaming star of death.” That apparently means you are dying and need to crawl off into the wilderness to do so. Elvis plays a mixed-blood character named Pacer Burton who lives with his white father and brother and Kiowa Native American mother in the open hill country of Texas. He is torn between staying with his peaceful ranching family or siding with the Kiowa to avenge the racism by many of the other nearby white people.

Elvis is noted by many critics and fans for turning in one of his best acting performances. Another reason I really enjoyed the movie is that the acting overall is better than most Westerns, including strong performances from I Dream of Jeannie's Barbara Eden and John McIntire as the dad, who also famously played Sheriff Al Chambers in my favorite movie Psycho, also released in 1960.

Frank Sinatra and Marlon Brando had been pegged to play the brothers in Flaming Star, but Elvis ended up getting the lead role as he was seeking more parts with less singing (he does sing and play a little guitar early on in the movie).  

Oh, and Elvis's song "Flaming Star" as part of the soundtrack is a really good galloping number that I had somehow never heard before.

4 out of 5 stars

Challengers challenges

I watched quite a bit of Day 1 of the French Open. Then I went and hit around on the courts for a while.

I should have stopped with the tennis at that point.

Instead I went to see Challengers tonight, and struggled mightily to stay interested in the new hit film featuring Zendaya.

The acting is fine. But there's not enough of it. 

Zendaya and crew look impressive on the tennis courts, even if there's a chance their strokes are all CGI.

The bonkers soundtrack (and not in a good way) never fails to come ripping in and slow down the action, making the movie a good 20 minutes longer than it needs to be. 

The movie itself is a soft-porn vehicle to feature Zendaya basically in a 2-hour-plus music video.

It makes sense that the music - supplied by Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails - is there to add suspense to who will win the challenge to gain Zendaya's love. But the story itself is as threadbare and vacant as Reznor's way-over-dramatic (and way in the foreground) music. And the three main characters are so unlikeable that it takes away the chance for investment in caring much about any of them.

It would make sense if I liked Challengers. Director Luca Guadagnino cites Alfred Hitchcock and Psycho as among his favorite directors and films, and I can see some of those attempts to emulate the master here. His work on 2017's Call Me By Your Name was much better than Challengers, which is closer in style to his remake of Suspiria (pro tip: see the original version, not Guadagnino's).

In the end (and especially with that lame ending), the whole thing somehow makes me a little embarassed that I love the sport of tennis so much. I need to schedule my next match to wipe the taste of Challengers out of my mouth.

1.5 out of 5 stars

RIP Morgan Spurlock (but not fast food)

Maybe it’s just a matter of getting older and wiser, but it seems like the movie Super Size Me was the point in my life when I went from regularly devouring Big Macs and Quarter Pounders with Cheese and Fish Filets to only very rarely (usually on long road trips) having a meal at McDonald’s. 

The small documentary (a $65,000 production) turned into a massive hit ($22 million at the box office) and seemed to be a bad sign for the restaurant chain and possibly all fast food. It was released in May 2004, but a month of eating McDonald’s (the plot), in the end, didn’t kill director and star Morgan Spurlock. Who’s to say it didn’t shorten his life, but he did live until passing away from cancer this week at the age of 53, exactly 20 years after the movie’s release.

I think my decision to cut back on fast food was even more influenced by reading the excellent Fast Food Nation, by Eric Schlosser. The book was a slightly more intellectual indictment of fast food than the movie, but they did work powerfully in tandem. 

What seemed like the progress of the human species back then to taking steps for health improvement now only looks like a small blip on the radar, as parents allowing their children to regularly eat fast food continues to climb back to near universal numbers. 

The fast-food scare did, however, mostly end marketing directly to children, but now most of the publicity is done by celebrity spokespeople who draw kids into eating what used to be considered the adult food (only 2 percent of McDonald’s marketing budget is focused on Happy Meals).

During the month-long experiment that was Super Size Me, Spurlock gained a whopping 25 pounds as well as a slew of maladies including depression, fatigue, headaches, and liver and heart damage. He went on to have an impressive body of work in documentary filmmaking, including a follow up to Super Size Me about McDonald’s since-incorporated healthier food options, the pop band One Direction, male masculinity (in partnership with Jason Bateman and Will Arnett), and the only other one I’ve actually seen, Where in the World is Osama bin Laden? (which many critics said made too much light of a serious story).

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes: Are we humans really humans or are we monkeys?

I've written about all the Planet of the Apes movies and I even named the 1968 original number 6 on my list of all-time favorite films. What is it that draws me to these films? 

For one, they have virtually all been really well done, with the Mark Wahlberg/Tim Burton 2001 edition being the only non-essential addition. CGI dehumanizes most movies that use it, but the Apes never lose their heart and their ability to overwhelm our senses.

The other thing is that apes and monkeys are just awesome. They obviously aren't humans but their similarities to humans is always present. Just about any story that places monkeys on or around the same level as humans has a good shot at gripping me. The premise - which some think is goofy -remains quite probably my favorite one in all of movie and pop-culture history.

But it's not just the premise. The big-budget, action-adventure parts wouldn't work nearly so well if there weren't exceptional characters and big sociological issues being dealt with. All the latest in the remarkably long-running series are prequels to the 1968 original, so we know somehow that humans will find a way to survive, if only in small pockets where they can escape the potential wrath of the apes. Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011), Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (2014), and War for the Planet of the Apes (2017) set the scene: humans developed an Alzheimer's cure that leaked from the lab and made most humans dumber but somehow made apes smarter.

As for the new Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, I loved it and the suspense and questions it asks at the end are a monumental setup for the inevitable collision course with the original's Charleton Heston-led storyline. 

Taking place several generations after War, a Coastal-dwelling and fierce clan of apes have twisted the meanings of the former great leader Caesar, who had dictated peace among the apes ("ape not kill ape") and also between the apes and humans. Nearly all apes have forgotten or never known about Caesar by this point. So the evil and power-hungry apes are exploiting that lack of historical knowledge and are now on a rampage to enslave any apes and humans who don't bow to their commands. 

However, there is one bird-loving, talented-climbing community of chimpanzees that, along the way, discover the true teachings of Caesar, and provide a formidable foe to the bad guys. Humans don't even appear in the film's first half, and when they do, we see they are witless packs who roam to survive and run from the occasional ape encounter. Monkeys have no reason to believe any of them can think let alone talk. But then along comes Nova (different from the Nova of the 1968 film, but apes have taken to calling many or all humans by that name), played by Freya Allan, who teams with the peaceful, bird-loving monkeys to not only outwit the evil apes but (hopefully?) revive humanity. Raka, an orangutan, is also key in relocating this bridge between humans and Caesar's apes.

In many ways, the chronology of the Apes movies doesn't much matter. It feels like humans (and apes) will keep repeating the failures and mistakes of our past, into time immemorial. We will keep fighting other tribes. We will keep believing unfactual things. We will keep getting diseases that some make it difficult to remedy. I think humanity's own current foibles is why the Planet of the Apes continues to be so awe-inspiring.

5 out of 5 stars

How Steve Martin became (and stayed) a titan of comedy

Steve Martin was around 10 when he realized that, even though he didn’t have a talent, he wanted to be on stage. His workaround was to learn magic tricks and say “welcome ladies and gentlemen.” Voila, that put him in show business, and the rest is history ... at least as told in Apple TV+'s new, three-hour documentary STEVE! (martin) a documentary in 2 pieces.

About that same time, young Steve started a job at Disneyland and his childhood from there was as happy as could be, at least outside his house. His dad was a jerk, and Martin came to the realization later in life that his dad had just not been that good of a person. 

Anyway, he eventually realized that magic was a bit of a dead end but comedy might not be. He met a girl who helped convince him to find the meaning of life and to find himself, and he started going to Long Beach State to study philosophy. 

He discovered he wanted to find “real laughter … like the kind you have with your friends.” Bob Hope and others built up the tension then released it with punchlines. but Martin thought real laughter could come more from building up the tension and not releasing it. The audience would have to pick their own places that made them laugh. 

He transferred to UCLA and took advanced logic then began having new experiences: travelling across the country and also dating a girl whose family was fun-loving in all the ways his own family wasn’t. 

As he aged a little more, he looked like someone from the Eagles then decided to shave his beard, lose his country outfits, and create a new look for a new future. He began opening for his friends in the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, as well as lots of other bands, from The Carpenters to Black Oak Arkansas. 

He thought the 500-person venues were too hostile and started headlining his own shows in front of 40 people or so, and it worked. He was killing it with college audience but fell flat to older adults in a week-long run at the Playboy Club in San Francisco. He decided his comedy needed to appear in weird places. 

By 1975, Martin was in his early 30s and thought he was flying the flag for the new world of comedy. Then he saw something come onto TV called Saturday Night Live and worried. But fortunately he became a regular guest on SNL and by the time he retired what could be called his 1970s classic standup act, in 1980, he had become the biggest standup comedian in history.

There isn’t much about 1979’s The Jerk in the documentary, other than that his dad didn’t give it the time of day. I would’ve liked more focus on that (The Jerk is my 21st favorite comedy movie of all-time) and his other best films The Man With Two Brains and Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid (my 49th favorite). 

Perhaps he doesn't include much about any one of his movies because he says his stand-up career had a beginning, middle, and end, but with movies, they are each like little anecdotes rather than full chapters of a book. In fact, one of his hobbies detailed in the doc is creating dialogue for comic strips that a friend then draws. Many of those are about the anecdotes from and of his films.

There are also stories about his other hobbies, which include having dogs and collecting paintings. And finally, the doc covers his relationship with comedy buddy Martin Short and his wife Anne Stringfield, whom he met when she was fact checking his writing for The New Yorker.

I especially enjoyed the stories in the documentary from his childhood and coming of age in the comedy scene. Listening to his records, reading his short-essay collections, and seeing Martin on SNL were among my fondest childhood memories. His life was long overdue for a telling in this format, although the documentary could have been tightened up just a little bit.

4 out of 5 stars

Anyone But You offers the rare opportunity to watch a worthy rom-com

I must be getting warmed up for Challengers (a tennis rom-com with Zendaya that I'm very excited about) because - on the plane from Washington, D.C. to St. Louis - I had just enough time to watch Anyone But You. The flick does the genre relatively proud in a day and age when rom-coms have been stumbling along to find any footing. 

Bea, played by Sydney Sweeney with slapstick body language, is a law student who bumps into debonaire Ben (Top Gun: Maverick's Glen Powell) at a Boston coffee shop. The two hit it off and have a magical night together, which goes wrong when some pedestrian (it would have been better to be outrageous Three's Company-style) miscommunication occurs the next morning. This sets them on a course to despising each other, even after they randomly meet again months later and are forced into spending time together at a wedding in Sydney, Australia. 

The whole thing is like a ridiculous beach-read novel that you can't put down even though you know you probably should. It's also painfully far-fetched, but that's another reason to enjoy it some time when you have 90 minutes to put your brain on autopilot.

Here are a few interesting things about Anyone But You (not spoilers):

• Sweeney was excellent in the first season of The White Lotus and has been one of the hottest actors since then.
• The story is a loose adaptation of Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing.
• Darren Barnet from Never Have I Ever plays one of Bea's love interests.
• Dermot Mulroney stars as Bea’s father and Director Will Gluck made the cast watch Mulroney's 1997 rom-com classic My Best Friend’s Wedding before filming.
• Este Haim of the band Haim was in charge of music.
• Production had some tribulations, including a spider biting Sweeney and a helicopter having to make an emergency landing.
• Anyone But You caught word-of-mouth fire and made more money at the box office in week 2 of its release than it did in week 1 and more in week 3 than in week 2.
• Part of the reason for the film's popularity was that Powell and Sweeney hung out together in real life and leaned into selling their chemistry as a reason for the masses to check them out on the big screen.
• It has become huge overseas, with nearly $220 million in global box-office gross.

In the end, Sweeny and Powell truly do sell what would have been an average movie into a highly watchable one.

3.5 out of 5 stars

Killers of the Flower Moon tells the true tale of whites against the Osage tribe

The fact that Killers of the Flower Moon is probably the best movie ever about the genocide by whites of Native Americans says a lot about how we as a civilization have buried this horror story. It’s a really great film that also puts on display how far Hollywood still has to go to truly tell the story of Native Americans.

This one is not really it. Probably eighty percent focuses on the gang of rich white oilmen, led menacingly by Robert DeNiro, and their systemic plan to wipe out the entire Osage tribe. Leo DiCaprio turns in his usual perfect performance as one of DeNiro’s main puppets.

I don’t want to hold it against this 2023 production that it’s more white-centric than Osage-centric because it really is an epic tale with phenomenal acting and, besides, it’s just really entertaining. That said, there are a lot of other relevant perspectives remaining for Hollywood to explore in the future.

Although Killers was nominated for just about every major category at the Academy Awards, it failed to win a single one of them. Martin Scorsese's film is based on David Grann's 2017 book. The true story places De Niro as a corrupt political operative who wrangles the oil rights out of the hands of the Oklahoma tribe in the 1920s. His nephew Ernest, played by DiCaprio, returns from World War I. Ernest genuinely falls in love with Mollie, an Osage whose family has lots of claim to the oil. DiNiro sees opportunities for much personal gain if he can get Ernest on board with killing lots of Mollie's family members. The Osage community begins to think the riots against Black people that happened in 1921 in Tulsa could very well be happening to them. 

Lily Gladstone as Mollie proves to be a breakout star. She is the first Native-American woman to win a Golden Globe for best actress.

The story is wrapped up at the end by a radio-show performance that lays out what became of all the main characters. A nice ending touch.

5 out of 5 stars

Mountain biking in Moab, Utah is a dream come true

I've always loved mountain biking. I don't do it anymore as much as other activities like tennis and road biking, but when I do, I always have a blast (even when tumbling bike over heels down cliffs, which seems to happen way too often to me).

So knowing that about me, you can guess that Moab, Utah has been a place I've wanted to visit for a long time. It's known as the mecca of mountain biking in the U.S. I took about a three-hour ride on Saturday with my family and didn't do anything too daring, but it was an exciting taste of what the area known for Arches and Canyonlands national parks has to offer. 

We rode in Dead Horse Point State Park, which is located on a mesa (a flat-top mountain) high above many breath-taking views of the Grand Canyon-like sandstone cliffs of Canyonlands National Park and the Colorado River.

It seemed like we barely explored the 17-mile mountain-bike trail system located in the park. It takes a long time to go a little way over such rocky trails, especially with our 10-year-old in the mix. That said, she was able to conquer the many obstacles along the way and this is a really good option for other families with young kids (and bike rentals, although pricey, are available right there in the park at the trailhead alongside a handful of camping yurts).

Other points to note:

• Dead Horse Point allegedly got its name from many horses dying there from exposure to the elements high on the mesa (it was a very windy ride, at least on this day).
• It has provided a set for many movies and TV shows, including Con Air (1997), Joe Dirt (2001), MacGyver (1985), Mission: Impossible 2 (2000), Westworld (2016), and, most famously, the ending scene in Thelma & Louise (1991).

 

The Holdovers is a classic comedy-drama indie

Director Alexander Payne cements himself as a modern great after Election, Sideways, and The Descendants. And then he returned in 2023 with a Dead Poet’s Society-like second showcase for the brilliant Paul Giamatti, with The Holdovers.

Much like Election, it’s a coming-of-age story, about kids that get left behind for the winter break at their boardings school and Giamatti’s disliked ancient-history teacher is left in charge of them. Da’Vine Joy Randolph is about the only other person left around on campus. She is the head of the cafeteria whose son attended the school and has recently died. The friendships those two and the kids, especially the one portrayed by Dominic Sessa, strike up over their couple of weeks together are unlikely, painful, and often hilarious. 

Randolph won the Academy Award for best supporting actress.

Not enough borderline-indie drama/comedies like this are made these days by Hollywood.

4.5 out of 5 stars

Why E.T. always makes me cry

I would probably be considered an R.E.M. Relatively emotional male. I've known this since at least 1982, when I first saw E.T. The Extra Terrestrial. This movie - my fourth favorite of all time - has consistently made me heavily cry each of the 15 to 20 times I've seen it.

The stretch from when the "man on the moon" arrives at Elliot's house - in hazmat suits - through until the end of the film pretty much has me in a mess. And it did again this week, when I watched it with my kids.

Digging deep to try to understand myself, here are some of the spots in E.T. that seem to dig themselves into my heartstrings:

• From the very start, E.T. is lost in a faraway land. He's scared and he's harmless. But people don't know that he's harmless, with even Elliot letting out a few good screams into the alien's face before becoming incredibly confortable with him. As we get to know E.T., we see his longing and pain to get reunited with his space buddies.
• I could also relate to Elliot's world. He was the kid brother like myself who not only had to deal with his older brother but with his dad having run away to Mexico with his new girlfriend. My parents also got divorced when I was about the same age as Elliot. Director Steven Spielberg too says he created the movie based on the imaginary friend he had after his own parents' divorce.
• The friendship between E.T. and Elliot is definitely heartwarming in and of itself, especially seeing how Elliot doesn't seem to have much of a network of friends for support like his older brother does.
• E.T.'s growing ability to speak and communicate with Elliot and his brother and sister is part of it, and when the alien begins to rapidly blurt out phrases like "E.T. phone home," it's a mixture of hilarious and heartwarming.
• It's odd that the government agents would contribute to my emotions, but they do add a layer of "bad guy" and some scariness to the story, as we have no idea what they might do to semi-defenseless little E.T.
• Of course, in the scenes when we know Elliot must let go of his new friendship, it is probably the hardest to take, even if we know deep down that their relationship has to end somehow.
• It can't be forgotten that all the bike riding by the kids harkens back to serious memories of childhood. Like the characters in the Valley outside Los Angeles, I rode everywhere around my town outside of St. Louis to get everywhere.
• Finally, the music by John Williams is big, awesome symphonic stuff similar to Raiders of the Lost Ark and Star Wars, and I connected it a lot with the music in Alfred Hitchcock films, many of which are my very favorites in cinemal history.

There now, I've said it. Want to make me cry? E.T.'s got all the ingredients necessary.

One Love entertains, but isn't the place to start with Bob Marley

I was so inspired by Bob Marley that I journeyed to Jamaica to retrace his footsteps after high school. Admittedly, on that trip, I wasn’t very successful at going very far beyond the beach hotel I stayed at in Montego Bay (far from Trench Town) with two life-long buddies.

Likewise, the new movie Bob Marley: One Love doesn't go too far into telling the full story of the reggae legend. Perhaps I’ve read too much about him and expect too much, because when my son and I checked it out Saturday night, I felt a little let down. It drags in a few spots, but mainly it seems to tie together a bunch of events in Marley's life (his life-long love with his wife Rita, the gangs that keep coming after him for half-explained reasons, a European tour, debates about the direction of his album artwork with record execs) along a path that leads up to a big concert aimed at reunifying a divided Jamaica.

There are a lot of parts left out. The movie glosses the surface of Marley's Rastafarian beliefs, which eventually kill him too early since they keep him from getting his toe amputated. The filmmakers don't explain why he decides to leave the toe and let cancer spread through his body. They really don't explain why the gangs are after him. They don't explain the affairs that kept the tension so high between Rita and Bob.

I like the performances from Kingsley Ben-Adair as Bob (he was also in Barbie and the 2020 remake of High Fidelty) and Lashana Lynch as Rita. However, I don't think Ben-Adair is great in the music scenes. Perhaps it's too difficult to match Marley's vibrancy, but the actor didn't look that comfortable playing guitar and almost all of the music looked obviously lip synched and was also just pulled straight from the albums, so when a live performance would be happening on stage, it oddly would sound like a studio effort. Very sloppy.

When I could get past some of those distractions, I was able to enjoy much of the movie. It would be pretty difficult to completely destroy such a great life story. But still, much of that life remains a mystery in this version. If you really want to learn about Bob Marley, go with either the 2012 documentary Marley or Catch a Fire: The Life of Bob Marley by Timothy White. While you're at it, see my top 30 Marley songs.

3 out of 5 stars

How Alfred Hitchcock's childhood and murderous interests shaped his movies

Psycho remains my favorite movie and so it makes sense that I am likewise fascinated with its creator Alfred Hitchcock. I’ve read a lot about the master, and I’m particularly enjoying the 2022 book The Twelve Lives of Alfred Hitchcock. Author Edward White (pictured) places Hitchcock into 12 categories: the boy who could not grow up, the murderer, the auteur, the womanizer, the fat man, the dandy, the family man, the voyeur, the entertainer, the pioneer, the Londoner, and the man of god.

Early on, in the Introduction, White doesn’t really reveal anything fans don’t know about the man who made an impressive 54 films. Hitch obviously had many contradictions, so the argument is presented that at least 12 of his personas are needed to explore in order to understand the full person. The parts I probably know the least about are the first two: about his childhood and why White refers to him as “the murderer.” Here’s what I learned in those two sections:

• Hitchcock himself articulated most of what is known about his childhood, mainly that he was a mostly solitary but not unhappy child. One oft-told story about the origin of his anxiety was how his father sent him to a police station with a note when Alfred was about five years old and they locked him in jail for a while. 
• His films were heavily influenced by the long-forgotten authors he loved as a boy, and also Edgar Allan Poe.
• Hitch didn’t treat children as children, both in his movies and at home. But both adults and children loved him, especially with his TV series Alfred Hitchcock Presents and his Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine.
• Psycho, The Birds, and Marnie, in particular, deal with repressed childhood memories and may have become more interesting stories to him after a series of health scares possibly led him to think more about his own immortality.
• Hitch never much talked about his own childhood traumas. But his father died of emphysema when he was 15 and the war soon began with about six years of trouble, as German bombs rained down on London., often very close to his home. The Spanish flu showed up for the last year of the war.
• Moving from childhood, the next “life” of the director is as the murderer. 
• Many critics initially trashed Psycho, dismissing it as gratuitous violence. But it was an immediate smash hit with audiences, making tons of money at the box office despite its small budget (the studio didn’t have any faith in it either).
• Hitch didn’t want to actually be a 9-to5-type serial killer, but “violence and cruelty spurred his creativity.” His fascination with famous serial killers led him to often give books and materials about them to his writers and actors.
• His stories of murder weren’t about the victims but rather about male destructiveness, lashing out at women, other men, the government, or civilization as a whole. He said the best murderers regard their actions as a fine art, and he zoned in on that idea.
• Capturing evil at its utmost came in the form of his hiring to lead a film documenting Holocaust concentration camp atrocities. Night Will Fall (5 out of 5 stars) was not released until 2014, but it truly captures those unimaginable days in Europe, often with long shots, not panning away, from images like the piles of clothes of the dead and the "shower heads" in the gas chambers that were much like the notorious one in Psycho.

Up to this point, 12 Lives is a winner and I'm looking forward to the rest of it. The analysis of Hitchcock the man as well as his films is told in both an academic and engaging way. Zeroing in on the subject from 12 different directions allows White to dig deeper than some other Hitchcock bios have done with their straight, chronological formats.

5 out of 5 stars

"We Are the World" truly might have been the greatest night in pop

When I was 15, I already loved music so much, and it was a time when the “top 40” popular choices still meant something. It was what everyone listened to, and even if you were at heart a punk kid or something else, you had to at least begrudgingly admit that stuff like Michael Jackson, Hall and Oates, Journey, and Huey Lewis was good stuff. But one night, all those superstars and many others stepped into the studio all at once. The new movie The Greatest Night in Pop, just released on Netflix, takes a behind-the-scenes journey with mastermind Lionel Richie, and it’s a joyride for sure.

Harry Belafonte had travelled to see the horrendous famine in Ethiopia in the 1980s and Bob Geldof had just recorded Live Aid's “Do They Know It’s Christmastime?” in England. So he worked to recruit Lionel Richie and Quincy Jones to put together a similar effort in the U.S. They wanted to write a song with Stevie Wonder but couldn’t contact him, so they brought in Michael Jackson. He drove to Richie’s house to write the song, but he had to take practically every backroad in L.A. because Michael didn’t take freeways. 

There were no cell phones in 1985. Things didn’t move quickly. Getting an ambitious group of musicians together was a logistical nightmare. The only way it might happen was if it was in January in L.A. when everyone was in town for the American Music Awards. 

One of the memorable elements of “We Are the World” is how all the artists stood together in the studio. Richie thought they would all sing one by one in the vocal booth, but Jones said that would take weeks. They only had one night. This caused a little troublemaking by the likes of Cyndi Lauper and Wonder. The vocal arranger planned who would sing which parts and the artists had to hit it all quickly after arrival or else there could be chaos. Geldof got in front of everyone once they were situated and told them about what it was like on the ground in Ethiopia. A somber mood fell over the superstars, causing them to behave and not act like spoiled children or even celebrities. He got them to focus and “put what they feel into the song.” 

Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen were some of those who were instructed to sit out of the octaves. And it was getting hot with lights and people - “ripe” someone said - and everyone had to be really quiet to not mess up the tapes. Lauper, for one, had to remove a bevy of beads. Richie’s role was to not let it veer off at any point. If that happened, there could be 47 versions of the song - one for each artist in that building. But there was no time for that in a one-night-only event. Waylon Jennings walked out when someone suggested adding a Swahili bit; he didn’t think it fit his style at all. 

Once they got to the solo parts, Dionne Warwick and Al Jarreau struggled for a bit before Springsteen, Steve Perry, and Daryl Hall nailed it immediately. Huey Lewis was waiting for the end while many of the others were having to redo their bits over and over; he finally suggested they run all the way through so he and the others at the end could get some practice and it was agreed that was a good idea. 

Richie got home at 8 a.m. the next morning and his family all congratulated him on his awards and hosting, but all he could talk about was We Are the World. They didn’t really know what he was talking about, but that evening, the song was played everywhere at the same time. It was sung in many languages by big groups of people around the world. It sold more than a million copies its first weekend. And it won best album and single at the 1986 Grammys. To this day, USA for Africa has raised $160 million and is still going strong.  

5 out of 5 stars