No Accident

I watched Accident Man (2018) because it stars Scott Adkins, and I got a bonus bit of Michael Jai White.

Adkins is the Accident Man, an underworld assassin whose specialty is making it look like an accident. We meet him killing some rich guy, cleverly rigged to look like a suicide - all with Adkins voice-over explaining his methods and philosophy. Then he retires to his local, a private club for the band of assassins. Ray Stevenson (Punisher, R.I.P.) is the landlord, a retired killer. The rest of the crew are:

• Ray Park and Michael Jai White as a pair of American and English ex-special ops guys who specializing in making their hits look like crackhead street crimes. 
• Stephen Donald is Poison Pete, a creepy rat-faced poisoner
• Perry Benson is a bespectacled bloke who researches new murder techniques, like bandags that tigger anaphylactic shock
• Ross O' Hennessy is Carnage Cliff, a berserker killer
• Amy Johnson is a honeypot beauty with a katana

Finally, David Paymer is the middle-man arranger. He meets with the clients and brings the jobs in. So none of the crew know the clients, and vice versa.

Adkins gets a call from Paymer, telling him he can't pick up the payoff, and directs him to what turns out to be an ambush - not a very effective one either. But before he can get to the bottom of this, he finds out that his ex-girlfriend has been murdered.

She had left him for a woman, the hostile Ashley Greene. She lets him know that she was pregnant with his baby. And she was working on some ecological investigative MacGuffin. So Adkins comes to the conclusion that someone is killing everyone who might know about this. And they are hiring from his own crew. Guess how it comes out?

I like Adkins a lot, although he is usually a minor bad guy or the star of a bad (in a good way) movie. I've said I keep thinking he's Paul Rudd or Ben Stiller, but here, he's clearly doing Jason Statham. Partly it's his accent, partly it's his coarse misogynistic, misanthropic, asshole persona. 

As for the fights, they are great. Director Jesse P. Johnson has a stunt background, and of course, Adkins is an accomplished martial arts actor. Slo-mo flying kicks are a specialty. Other than Park and Jai White, maybe Amy Johnson, the others aren't big fighters. But they are great character actors. You'll see seversal "that guy" types.

The movie has a sort of amoral, sniggering asshole-ish attitude, but it is a comedy. It's kind of offputting, but representation is not endorsement. This is the first slick, real budget production I've seen Adkins star in. I like it. 

Snakes for the Memories

Man, I almost forgot that we watched Anaconda (2025). It's easy to see why.

Jack Black, Paul Rudd, Steven Zahn, and Thandiwe Newton were childhood friends, united in their love of bad movies - such as Anaconda. With Black as a budding director and Rudd a hope-to-be actor, they even made their own amateur films. Now, Black is a wedding videographer, and Rudd is an aspiring extra in Hollywood, with a few episodes of S.W.A.T. as his resume. But when Black has a significant birthday, he shows up back home with a copy of their childhood movie, and a great idea.

At the party, he tells his friends that he got the rights to remake Anaconda for a song, and suggests that they go to the Amazon and do it, with Black directing and Rudd starring. And off they go.

The boat captain they hired doesn't show up, but someone claiming to be his daughter lets them aboard. But we know she's a fugitive from the police. Their local snake wrangler shows up with an anaconda that's a little spicy. And then it gets weird.

However, it doesn't get that weird. It spends way to much time on the group's mid-life crises. Black and Rudd have unsatisfied ambitions, Newton and Rudd have unsatisfied sexual tension, and Zahn has addiction issues. He's "Buffalo sober", just beer, wine and lighter pills - no hard liquor or drugs. He's does a lot with a tiny role, and I wouldn't have minded seeing a little more.

The Amazonian setting was largely wasted, and of course all snakes were CGI. There were some decent gags, like when Black is eaten by the big snake and killed - SPOILER! But there could have been a lot more. For a talented group of improvisers, they don't make much of what they have.

So, amiable fun, but not really fun enough. There's some cute stuff with Rudd and Black trying to work Themes into the script, and maybe that's the idea - there are no themes in this movie. Except the theme seems to be "mid-life crisis", and it doesn't do that very well. Also, the movie wants us to see the crew as completely incompetent and talentless, but also good enough to pull this remake off. 

Once I noticed this movie on my "To Watch" list and realize that I had watched it, I remembered quite a bit of it. But I don't think I will for long. 

K Hole

I just came off a Jackie Chan marathon, and part of the weaning process was Detective K: Secret of the Living Dead (2018). I've mentioned Detective K before - a three movie Korean series inspired by the Detective Dee movies. now I've watched all three.

In the Jeoseon Korea, a young woman wakes up in the rain. She has no memory but incredible strength. In this town, people are being found dead, with two holes in their neck, leading to rumors of vampires. Other people are also turning up burned to death, and we actually see one. Someone is shooting flaming arrows at people - and burning is one of the only ways to kill vampites.

When Detective K gets involved, the first "vampire" tracked down turns out to be a porphyry victim, drinking blood as a palliative for his condition. Typical Detective Dee/K - apparently supernatural events have a mundane, scientific explanation. But what about the girl with super-strength?

SPOILER - there are vampires, and she's one. 

The movie has the classic Detective K mix of buffoonery and horror. K is a braggart, full of himself even when wrong. And his sidekick is always there to make fun of him. But he quickly teams up with the girl, working together to get to the bottom of the vampires.

I enjoyed this in a sort of passive way - I didn't track most of the plot, but I laughed at the jokes and liked the action. I think the series may have run out of steam - the first was better than the second, and the third is weakest. But as a time-wasting fun movie, it was fine, and I hope to find more movies like it. 

Chan's the Man

I've been on a Jackie Chan kick, starting with DVDs in my own collection. When I was done with those, I found Rob-B-Hood (2006) streaming.

We meet Thongs (Jackie Chan) and Octopus (Louis Koo) cracking safes. Even while committing this crime, Chan is placing bets on the phone. When they are cracking the medicine safes at a hospital, they stumble into a hostage scene. A man has grabbed a woman's just delivered baby, claiming that it is his, not her husband's. When security starts to pile on him, he falls over a railing with the baby, and plummets to his death - but Jackie, in the middle of a heist, grabs the baby. In the excitement they slip away.  Their mastermind and mentor, Landlord (Michael Hui), is driving the getaway minivan.

We learn a little bit about their lives here. Chan is a degenerate gambler. He always owes money, ad his father rejects him in shame. Koo likes to spend money on Ferraris and shopping expeditions for high-class women. He is always running into his wife, who has to work at jobs like wearing a chicken suit outside a restaurant to make ends meet. And eventually, Koo's money runs out, his car is repoed, etc. 

And Hui, a tubby old man with thick glasses, has a wife who went crazy when she lost a pregnancy. She carries a baby doll whereever she goes. He is very kind and loving to her, and saves all the money he steals, building up a nest egg that is suddenly stolen. Now they all need money desperately. 

Hui finds a big job, and the guys jump on it with o questions. They only discover what it is when they are on the job - kidnapping a baby. They don't want to go through with it, but the price is millions. So they get the baby and get out. 

In the escape, Hui gets booked for reckless driving and has to go to prison for ten days. During this time, Chan and Koo have to keep the baby amused, fed and cleaned. So I went in thinking this was Little Miss Marker, now it's more Ransom of Red Chief. Actually, it's Three Men and a Baby - there's a mix of the regular trials of keeping a baby, and ridiculous stunts like getting the baby carriage stuck on the end of a police vehicle or carrying the baby over a roller coaster, being pursued by trains full of goons. 

It ends with them executed for kidnapping - nah, just kidding. There is no death penalty in China in 2006. But they do go to prison, with time off for saving the baby after kidnapping it. 

This is a different Jackie Chan movie, because he isn't a really nice guy. But he's about the softest he can be, while still being a crook and gambler. Also, he puts that baby in peril a lot. The movie also has a lot of baby poop jokes, which I could have lived without. But overall, pretty fun. 

I finished this Chan-athon with Magnificent Bodyguards (1978), a much older movie. Jackie plays an arrogant and skilled kung fu fighter. A woman crime boss, Wang Ping, hires him to escort her and her sick brother across the bandit-infested Stormy Mountains. Jackie gets James Tien for back up and they head for the hills. On the way, they pick up some allies, fight a lot of fights, and confront the king of the Stormy Mountains. There are some twists, including some that I couldn't figure out. A baby appears, who might have been Jackie in flashback, or maybe I was just flashing on Rob-B-Hood. 

Anyway, this was very conventional. Even though Jackie did fight choreography, it was pretty standard fare with a lot of wirework. And Jackie, in his period wig, could almost be anyone. He also shares screentime with a lot of people, so this doesn't seem so much like a Jackie Chan movie, more of a standard wuxia period piece.

Which is fine, I watch plenty of those. So this was a good way to wean me off of my Jackie Chan dependency. 

Mysterium Delirium

Here's a fun one from our youth: Beat the Deva (1980). A wacky student film that combines noir, New Age, and the classical music of Scriabin.

Caspar J. Upanishad is a film maker who works as a private eye to make ends meet. But he's thinking there might be money in this New Age stuff he's been hearing about. His girlfriend is playing something odd on the piano, and he finds out it's by Scriabin. He learns that Scriabin, or Screech as they call him, didn't just compose pretty sonatas, but also saw music as colors, was ispired by semi-divine Devas, and planned an enormous festival of sound, smells, tastes, colors and peace and unity in the foothills of the Himalayas, called the Mysterium. But he died before he could make it happen. (BTW, the Scriabin stuff is legit - even the "Scrjabin" spelling.) But Upanishad realizes that he was probably bumped off because he was getting too close.

He goes to a professor at Harvard for info, and is warned about the danger or color-music theory. Indeed, some thugs beat him up outside to get him off the case. While he's unconscious, he is visited by a cute little animated deva, who lets him know that he, Casper, is the chosen one - the one who will trigger world peace by staging Scriabin's Mysterium.

But Upanishad's name is Caspar, not Casper. Could the Devas have made a mistake. And why was there a sore on Upanishad's lip, right where Scriabin had a carbuncle - that killed him!?!?

This is a super-low budget student film, under one-hour long. But it manages to be stylish, smart and funny. Some parts are filmed in noirish black an white. Some are even silent, with old-timey intertitles. The Devas and the info dumps about the Mysterium are all colorfully animated. Plus, it's full of dumb jokes and Upanishad driving up and down Storrow and Mem. Drive. Don't you love it when a movie shows someone driving somewhere you know, and it doesn't make any sense? Driving east, then west, then crossing the river, then east and west again, then back to where they started? OK, maybe that's just me.

Also, the soundtrack is all Scriabin, and he wrote some cool stuff.

We know about this because Ms. Spenser went to art school with one of the animators. We got to see it open with Suzanne Pitt's Asparagus, which is actaully on the Criterion Channel. But you can find Beat the Deva on YouTube and Vimeo. And I hope you do. 

Tron: Leto

I knew it was trash going in. After all, Jared Leto is in it. But I figured I might as well watch Tron: Ares (2025). For all its faults, it wasn't even as bad as expected.

The state of play: ENCOM, the good gaming and virtual reality corporation, and it's rival, evil corporation, Dillinger, are trying to bring virtual reality into real reality. Evan Peters, head of Dillinger, is demoing his latest line of 3D-printed war toys, including an artificial soldier, Ares (Jared Leto). When the impressed customers leave, the tanks, guns and Leto all turn to dust. As nepo-baby Peter's mom, Gillian Anderson reminds him, without the "permanence code", none of these constructs will last more than 29 minutes.

Greta Lee, on the other hand, is in ENCOM's secret polar lab, looking for the permanence code, supposedly left by founder Jeff Bridges, wayback in the 80s. Since ENCOM is having a big gamer's conference and the CEO (Lee) is out of pocket, things are getting dicey for the company. 

And Leto is back in the Grid, an artificial life-form back in Tronlandia. He is beginning to think Peters is evil, and maybe doesn't have his best interests in mind.

The rest of the plot plays out like you'd expect, with Grid creatures like Leto and crony Jody Turner-Smith experiencing the real world and becoming more human. No big surprises. But I was surprised by how good it looked. Director Joachim Rønning did himself proud. Many of the in-Grid sequences have more than a touch of 2001's slit-scan neon feeling. All in a palette based on reds.

Greta Lee did well in a sort of nothing good corporate boss as boss nerd role. Evan Peters was great as that contemporary type pf nepo baby, where lies are just alternate facts and consequences all fall on someone else. His mother, Gillian Anderson, plays the old-style evil - when she promises weapons of war, by god she delivers. She is very disappointed in her son.

Jared Leto is about as expected - he plays an artificial lifeform artificially. I wouldn't say he ruins the experience.

So, not a good movie. But I enjoyed it anyway.

Bullet Plane

When I got Fight or Flight (2024), the only thing I knew was that it was "Bullet Train on an airplane." I just didn't realize how literally to take that.

The premise is that an international hacker terrorist called the Ghost is getting on a plane from Bangkok to San Francisco, with a McGuffin. But the government doesn't have any agents in Thailand, so they can't get anyone on hte plane in time. They have to re-activate drunk, disgraced agent Josh Hartnett, by promising him a legit passport.

Recognize the setup? Female agent activates cute but unconventional agent for assassination mission? Hartnett is even styled to look a little like Brad Pitt. 

To cut to the chase, when he gets on the plane, he discovers that everyone on the plane is either the Ghost, or trying to kill the Ghost, for the John-Wick-style bounty. Mayhem ensues. 

I don't think I need to go into any more detail. You get the idea. It was a fun ride, maybe not quite Bullet Train level. If you loved that, you'll at least like this. 

Falcon Cresting

Working my way through random Michael Jai White movies, I came across Falcon Rising (2014). It it is set in Brazil and White has some capoeira-adjacent skills, I figured it was a good bet.

White is a troubled veteran. He plays a complicated game of Russian roulette, and survives. Low on liquor, he heads to a local party store, which inevitably gets held up. When confronted, he holds the robber's gun to his heart and demands that he shoot. When the robbers won't kill him, he gets impatient, beats them up, pays for his booze with their money and leaves.

He meets with his sister, who has been down in Brazil, doing social work in the favelas. A while after she leaves, he is contacted by old Army buddy, now State Dept guy, Neal McDonough (white haired baddy from Arrow), His sister has been beaten into a coma, and they haven't caught the people who did. So White heads for Brazil.

There he meets Millie Ruperto, a beat cop in the favela who uses community policing methods, and Jimmy Navarro, a tough talking officer who pledges to do whatever it takes to find White's sister's killer. In one scene, White's PTSD is triggered by a loud noise, and he gabs Roperto's gun, triggering an armed standoff between the police and the favela gangs. Navarro defuses it by offering to fight the biggest guy in the gang, one on one. Ths is a decent fight scene with a capoeira flavor. 

Unfortunately, there aren't as many of these as you might want. White has a number of fights, but I didn't find them to be his best. There were a lot of chases, some gunfights, etc. It was a fine action movie, and White's power and charisma shone through, but the actual fight choreography didn't impress me. 

In the end, Nick Fury Neal McDonough invites White to join the Falcon Project, to become a deniable loose cannon for the State Dept. This would set up a series of sequels. SPOILER - never happened. 

Haunting Presence

While looking for some other DVD, I discovered an unopened copy of The Haunted Palace (1963), a Roger Corman/Vincent Price movie supposedly based on an Edgar Allen Poe story, but mostly a version of Lovecraft's Case of Charles Dexter Ward. 

It starts in colonial days in Arkham MA, with Vincent Price using hypnotic powers to get young women under his power for some hideous purpose. The townspeople, including Elisha Cook Jr., and Bruno VaSoto, drag him out, tie him to a tree and burn him alive. He cursed the town and its people, unto the last generation, and promised to return.

One hundred ten years later, Price, a descendant of the burnt witch and his bride Debra Paget come to Arkham in a coach. They have inherited the great palace that the witch lived in - although it has been uninhabited the entire time (?). They stop in a pub where they meet some of the hostile locals, including descendants of the witchburners. They advise him to leave, then when they find out that he has inherited the haunted palace, they get really nasty. The doctor, Frank Maxwell, is at least friendly, but also suggests that they leave and don't look back. But Price refuses to leave without at least looking at his palace.

When they arrive, they find it in pretty good shape. That's because caretaker Lon Chaney Jr. has been alerted to their presence and has made preparations. It makes the creepy place a little homier. And the mad painting of the original owner is disturbingly familiar. Done in a vaguely van Gogh style, it had a bit of the Ivan Albright (Picture of Dorian Gray) creepieness.

At first, Price agrees with Paget that they should leave as soon as possible, but the place begins to grow on him. Soon, he is talking like the old witch reborn. And what is in the mysterious tank in the deep dungeon? Some ancient aquatic abomination? 

I felt like this is on of the best of the Price/Corman/Poe (?) pictures. The cast is good (Paget wasted?), and the sets/art direction as well. But after a few days, I wonder if this is recency bias - I guess I have to do a rewatch.

In conclusion, I was pleased that the evil Price never lusted after his good self's wife. In fact the only time he made advances was to terrify her into leaving him alone.

Vaguely Cool

I've mentioned how much of a French New Wave fanboy I am - our college film society had a couple of great series on New Wave. So of course I wanted to see Nouvelle Vague (2025), Richard Linklater's fim about the making of Breathless. 

It stars Guillaume Marbeck as Jean-Luc Godard, a writer for the French movie journal Cahiers du Cinema. He is watching a recent movie with a group of other critics, like Truffaut and Chabrol. Back at the office, he wonders why no one from Cahiers was going to Cannes to see Truffaut's first movie, 400 Blows. After some office banter, he steals some office petty cash and head off to Cannes. 

He becomes desparate to make his own movie. He can't get a producer interested in Une Femme est une Femme, but gets the go-ahead for a gangster film from a treatment by Truffaut. He casts Jean-Paul Belmondo (Aubry Dullin) as the lead, and gets Jean Seberg (Zoey Deutch) to play the American girl he falls for. 

But his directorial style is more than peculiar. He likes to play pinball more than shoot, and days go by with only one take for one shot filmed. He just wants to wait for the perfect take, even if it isn't very perfect. He ignores continuity, eye lines, and the 180 rule. He films too many closeups and not enough coverage. It will be impossible to edit together. Belmondo will never work again and Seberg wants off the picture. Her last film was directed by noted sadist and perfectionist Otto Preminger, and this is a worse experience. Godard won't direct, except telling the actors to do less, or just do what they want.

The film is a rousing success. His fellow critics tell him, "Eh. It's no Citizen Kane." Then they heartily congratulate him.

This is a fun film for fanboys in a number of ways. First, it's in black and white and has a very New Wave feel. The actors chosen for the main roles, mostly unknown, are credible representations of the real life people they are portraying. I would have recognized Marbeck as Godard even if he wasn't labelled, and he isn't the most recognizable person. Dullin doesn't quite have Belmondo's swagger, even if he does have the nose (prosthetic?). Deutch makes a good Seberg, although I don't see the intensity I expected. I guess that's acting.

The range of characters from the milieu is enormous, and they are all labelled onscreen when they appear. So we get to see Truffaut, Chabrol, Agnes Varda, Jean Cocteau, Roberto Rosselini, and on and on. When Rosselini is giving a talk, the names in the audience just go on and on, ten or twenty of them. I can just here the applause each one gets in a movie theater (with the right audience). 

I'm not sure how non-fanboys would find this. Godard is shown as a major jerk, although maybe talented. The parade of historic New Wave personages would just be vaguely familiar namesWOuld the look of the film be beautifully nostalgic or just old and weird? Was the Dullin/Deutch connection strong enough to pull the viewer in, like Belmondo and Seberg? Was the tale of underappreciated genius compelling? 

I don't know - I'm a fanboy, and probably anyone who reviews this is too. So, enough for me. 

Battle Fatigue

As a Thomas Pynchon fan, of course I was psyched for One Battle After Another (2025), P.T. Anderson's adaptation of Vineland. Of course, like most Pynchon, Vineland is unfilmable - but he did a good job on Inherent Vice, so let's see how it goes.

We're thrown right into the movie, with an attack on an ICE holding camp by a group of revolutionaries who call themselves the French 75. Ghetto Pat, AKA Rocketman (Leonardo DiCaprio) is the demolition man, and lover of Perfidia Hollywood Hills (Teyana Taylor). Taylor is mad for this kind of action, taking every chance to fight, sling a slogan, and love up DiCaprio. It definitely turned him on. So when she finds Col. Lockjaw (Sean Penn), she orders him to stand - that is, get himself hard. 

In fact, they later hook up. 

Taylor and DiCaprio get married, and have a baby. DiCaprio wants to settle down, take care fo the kid, but Taylor is too much into the thrill of revolution. She kills a hostage in a bank robbery and is finally captured. Penn offers her amnesty for information, and when he threatens her daughter, she cracks. Most of French 75 are killed in a long montage. By the way, this is a comedy? Taylor goes into witness protection, but slips away to Mexico.

Sixteen years later, DiCaprio is living in a little northern California town (not Vineland, though). He lives in a shack, smoking dope and seeing feds everywhere. His daughter, Charlene AKA Willa (Chase Infiniti - how Pynchonesque!) is a fine young girl, active in high school and Benicio del Toro's dojo. 

Meanwhile, Penn has been moving up in the ranks. He gets an offer to join a secret, silly, Santa-worshipping white supremacist group. But if they find out that he had a black lover (Taylor), and maybe even a mixed race daughter (Infiniti), he would be cast out. So he starts looking for her.

Word of this gets back to DiCaprio through the remnants of the French 75 underground. While he tries to find out some info - and getting nowhere because he is too stoned to remember the underground codes and passwords. Maybe he wasn't paying much attention, anyway. OK, this is comedy. 

It ends up with a three-way chase and fight between Penn's forces, DiCaprio and the underground, and Infiniti, a very capable young woman. At least she remembers the recognition code, "Green Acres, Beverly Hillbillis, Hooterville Junction" - from The Revolution Will Not Be Televised. 

Parts of this movie were great, maybe all, but only in parts. It just didn't really hold together for us. Our main problem was that the comedy of very real repression and somewhat silly violent revolution was lost on us. Pynchon's message that revolution and repression are human, and therefore fucked up and fundamentally goofy is fine when the struggle is against, say, Reaganism. But we're living with immigrants and citizen being rounded up and even shot in the streets, and we just can't laugh at it. We don't see any armed struggle against it, not even one made up of sexed up thrill junkies. Anyway, the movie shows that most of them are only playing revolutionary. It left a sour taste.

Which is too bad, because many things do come across. DiCaprio's stoned dingbat trying to cope with an immediate emergency was actually comical. Most of the action was quite effective - the final car chase on long, rolling, empty California highways is pretty and thrilling, although maybe a bit long. DiCaprio did pretty well as a goofy stoner, and Penn was ... interesting as a swaggering bully. But he did a lot of mouth work - puckering, sucking his teeth, grimacing. It was a little overdone. 

One part I did like was that, like in Vineland, Taylor just sort of fades away. She isn't killed, she doesn't show up to save the day or otherwise. She's out of the picture, in the wind, a concept, a shadow, a myth, either idol or traitor. And Taylor sells the part so well that even her absence has a presence. 

Not So Good

We're big Michael Jai White fans, and it looks like he's making a bunch of direct to video films these days. So, I decide to watch a bunch, including As Good as Dead (2022).

Set in Mexico, it starts with student Luca Oriel being shaken down for lunch money by a local gang. This is the gang his brother runs with, but he's in prison now, so he has no one to turn to. But he has noticed Michael Jai White, a mysterious gringo recluse, doing martial arts training. So he he starts following his exercises from afar. White chases him off a few times, them starts training him.

When Oriel's brother gets out of jail, he and his fellow gang-bangers go to White's trailer to tell him to stay away from the kid. So he whoops them all. Doesn't make them love him, although Oriel is pretty proud. 

At an all-comers cage match, Oriel volunteers to fight a local big man, and beats him, due to his training. Specifically, he uses a distinctive defensive stance with fists up, elbows out and fore-arms protecting the face. Someone videos the fight and the video gets back to the US and Tom Berenger.

It seems Jai White is hiding in Mexico from some bad trouble in the US. And now Tom Berenger knows where he's hiding. So the last act will be White, Oriel, and the chastened gang against a militarized American force.

I'm afraid I can't say much good about this. White wasn't a big presence in this, and there are only a few real fights. The Mexican setting seemed a bit cliched, although I liked the way the gang was humanized (a little). Still, White is a real presence, and the whole thing was fun enough. Not great, but no complaints. 

Intolerable Hilarity

Speaking of movies that I saw before this blog that I'm watching again: Intolerable Cruelty (2003). The Blank Check podcast reminded me of how much I liked it, and I chanced upon a copy, so...

It starts with TV producer Geoffrey Rush coming home to his Hollywood home to find his wife messing around with the poolboy - and they don't have a pool. As divorce is imminent, she goes to divorce lawyer Miles Massey (George Clooney), who gets her a big settlement, even in the face of infidelity. He's just that good. 

Cedric the Entertainer is a scumbag private eye whose specialty is videoing indiscretions for divorce cases. He catches a politician in bed with a blonde, and nails his ass. That's his motto, "Nail his ass!"

The politician is married to Catherine Zeta-Jones, who wants a big divorce settlement. In fact, she makes a practice of marrying and divorcing rich men for money. But this time, the husband hires Clooney, and Zeta-Jones gets nothing. 

She sets out for revenge. She marries Billy Bob Thornton, an oil heir. But she insists that they get a pre-nup - the famous "Massey pre-nup", which has never been broken. So she will not be able to profit from the marriage. After the wedding, Thornton tears up the pre-nup, leaving himself exposed. There's a lot of gasping about being exposed. 

Then, when Billy Bob dies, and she's left a widow (and a rich one), they begin a romance, and get married. But will they have a Massy pre-nup?

This is a very screwball movie. The patter is snappy, and the romance and deception go hand in hand. In fact, the offended woman romancing for revenge was the driver for, for instance, The Lady Eve. And of course, the chemistry between our two beautiful leads is off the charts. Of course, Clooney knows how good he looks - we meet him at the dentist getting his teeth whitened. We see him peeling back his lips to inspect them in mirrors all throughout. And the plot is as twisty and nonsensical as any screwball. 

The Coens fill the movie with other great characters, like Billy Bob and Cedric the Entertainer. Cedric and Rush even get happy endings, as Rush is now hosting Cedric's TV show, America's Funniest Divorce Videos, where he shows you how he will "nail his ass!"

Let There Be Music

I'm sorry I haven't been keeping up very well. I've been taking a long vacation, at home, watching lots of movies. But there won't be a lot of blogging. A lot of my viewing has been rewatches. But I've also been watching some musical performances. For example, I watched Glass: The Perfect American (2013), the Philip Glass opera about Walt and Roy Disney.

I watched this on YouTube, but I was actually trying to watch another Glass opera, Satyagraha. When I couldn't get it, I gave this a try. It was inventively staged, with projected animations and sometimes ranks of animators in the background. There was an animator who complained about never being recognized by the brothers. The timeline was flexible, and in many scenes, Walt is delirious, dreaming or dead. This was all great. The music, however, did not really strike me. It was not deeply minimalist, more classical modern with a touch of minimalism and a few blues/jazz passages. Fun to watch, less to listen to.

A friend recommended Becoming Led Zeppelin (2025), a documentary made with input from the surviving members and some past interviews with Bonham. It was interesting to hear about the old days before they formed up, since they all had musical careers already. I was interested in Page's desire for Zep to never have a hit single - he made too many of those as a studio guy. He wanted Zep to be an album band! But because the doc was based on their interviews, I felt like it presented a cleaned up version, without as much personality as I could have hoped for. Maybe I'm spoiled by listening to The History of Rock and Roll in 500 Songs, which tends to go pretty deep. Still fun.

I also watched a lot of YouTube world music type concerts. I loved  Ben Aylon, who plays the Senegalese xalam, a lute with a skin soundboard. I also like Constantinople, a trio of kora, setar and percussion. YouTube's algorithm is very good about feeding these to me.  

And I hope to continue this, even as my vacation draws to a close. 

Naked with a Bullet

Ms. Spenser was pretty skeptical about The Naked Gun (2025), but I'd heard good things, so I threw it on while she was working. She ended up liking it more than me. 

It starts with a bank robbery. A little schoolgirl trapped among the hostages turns out to be... Frank Drebbin Jr., Liam Neeson. So he defeats the robbers wearing a plaid skirt. But he doesn't notice the head robber, Danny Huston, getting away with the contents of one safe deposit box, which turns out to be the P.L.O.T Device.

Because Neeson was a little bit over-zealous in the bank case, he is busted down to traffic. He arrives at the scene of a seeming suicide - someone drove their electric car right into the water. But back at the office, Neeson meets the man's sister, Pamela Anderson, who doesn't believe it was suicide. But she's a crime novelist, so she would. 

But you didn't come for the plot. You came for the jokes. And there are a lot of them. A cute runner is Neeson and the other cops getting handed a coffee every few minutes. Less cute is the long scene with Neeson suffering diarrhea from his disordered eating, then berating himself, then pigging out again. This wasn't so cute. I think percentage of tasteless jokes has risen a bit from the original trilogy. But this one has very little O.J. Simpson, so I guess it's a wash.

Also, a lot of the gags are straight up stolen from other movies - sometimes as homage, sometimes just a lift. That doesn't bother me, especially if the jokes are any good. But I did feel like there were fewer than there should be. The jokes in the background were still there, but I felt that the density wasn't. Maybe I'm idealizing the originals. though. I should rewatch, maybe (hard to sit through the O.J., though).

Neeson did a very respectable Drebbin - he has no trouble playing it straight and stone-faced. Pam Anderson was great as the dame, looking and acting the part. Of course, she's competing with Priscilla Presley and Anna Nicole Smith, so she doesn't have to stretch much. But it is nice to see her getting a middle-age return, looking lovely and a little more natural. 

So I laughed but felt a little let down. Ms. Spenser laughed (when she looked up from her work), and was pleasantly surprised. Maybe it's a question of expectations. 

The Count and the Vampire

Ms. Spenser was ready for some horror, and we thought The Vourdalak (2023) might fit the bill. Did it, or was it more horror-comedy?

In the 18th-century, the Count d'Urfe. a French delegate to a conference on the Russo-Turkish conflict, is robbed and separated from his party. The delegate, played by Kacey Mottet Klein, is left stumbling through an Eastern European forest in his court clothes and white makeup. The first habitation he finds turns him away, telling him to leave this forest - it isn't safe in the day and worse at night. But he does get directed to the Gorcha family that may help him out.

 He meets the family a few at a time. The middle son is a pretty young man who wears flowers and make up. The daughter is a rough beauty. The older son, who is out fighting the Turks, is married and has a young son. When he returns, having failed to kill the Turkish leader, he promises to the count that he can have a horse the next day. The patriarch, old Gorcha, has left to fight the Turks as well. He has left a note saying he will be back in six days. If he returns after six days, it won't be him, but a vourdalak, a kind of local vampire.

That night is the sixth. They find old Gorcha collapsed at the edge of the property. Even though the six days has elapsed, the eldest son doesn't believe in vourdalaks, and doesn't care that the old Gorcha looks like a gruesome puppet. And so they take him in.

As you can imagine, things don't go well for anyone, and in ways that are pretty horrific. However, the horror is a bit nonchalant. The tension isn't as tense as it could be. This may be a dramatic choice, showing how insidious horror can be - how easy it can be to accept violence and death. 

More seriously, the count and old Gorcha are both rather ridiculous. The count looks like a clown, in his white makeup with rouged cheeks. Old Gorcha resembles the puppet in Saw more than a Nosferatu. 

But we did like it a lot. The characters were interesting and fully formed, the setting unusual, and the horror horrible. But I think we enjoyed Mario Bava's take with Boris Karloff better. 

Head Fake

Well, I was looking for some stupid action, and Heads of State (2025). certainly filled the bill.

It starts in Spain, during the annual tomato-throwing festival (real thing, look it up). A news crew are actually a joint US/UK security operation, looking for Russian arms dealer Paddy Considine. There are a number of Considine look-alike decoys, so they call on ECHELON for gait recognition. But it's all a trap to get access to ECHELON. The ops are all killed, and Considine gets away.

Now we meet our stars. Idris Elba is the new British prime minister, embattled in the polls. John Cena is the ex-action star, now popular US president. Elba is a serious, slightly depressive type, Cena a gung-ho America-Fuck-Yeah type. They don't get along. A reporter at their joint press conference asks about the disaster in Spain, raising the tension even more. To show US/UK unity, Cena reluctantly offers to give Elba a ride on Air Force One to a conference in Trieste. But on the way, they are attacked and blown out of the sky.

Our two world leaders get out in parachutes, and make their way to a Warsawsafe house, manned by a kooky agent, Jack Quaid. Since the plot against them must have been an inside operation, they can't trust anyone. And so the race is on to get to Trieste, before the whole world order is overthrown.

I want to say this movie is much better than it has to be. The action is very good, almost too good - the downing of Air Force One is a little intense for an action-comedy. Of course, it was made by the director of Nobody, Ilya Naishuler. Coincidentally, Quaid was in another "normal guy meets action plot", Novocaine. The leads are charismatic as hell (of course) and have a nice Odd Couple chemistry.

But there are problems, mainly due to the current state of US politics. Cena plays a populist who mistakes movies for real life, like Reagan. But the US is under a very different kind of populist. Part of the plot of the film is that the bad guys want to disrupt and break up NATO, and Cena and Elba want to prevent that. Whereas the current US president is working hard to dismantle NATO, for the benefit of Russia. And so on. it makes it hard to laugh at some of Cena's antics. The movie also makes Elba, who wants to make careful, seem to be a bit of a killjoy, while a lot of uis would kill for a thoughtful leader. At least it turns out that Elba's prime minister was a real soldier and low-key badass, not just the movie version. 

I'm leaving out a bunch of good supporting actors, like Stephen Root, Carla Gugino, and Sharlto Copley, but now I've mentioned them. That's about all I have to say about the movie. I think it will be a lot more fun to watch in ten or twenty years. At least, I hope so. 

Angels on High

It's a little late for a Christmas movie, but we still wanted to watch We’re No Angels (1955).

Here's the set up: it's late December on Devil's Island. Three escaped prisoners are lounging around by the docks, Humphrey Bogart, Aldo Ray, and Peter Ustinov. As long as they are mistaken for parolees. they don't need to worry. Just just need some money and civilian clothes to get off the island and make a clean break. 

They go to a store run by Leo G. Carroll, and start swiping stuff. They want to rob the register, but it seems everyone buys on credit, and there's nothing there. Carroll is a nice but ineffectual man, and the boys offer to fix his roof (as an excuse to stick around and see what else they can carry off). Peeking down through skylights (like angels on high), they find out that 

• Carroll's cousin in Paris really owns the store, and the place is basically broke.
• His wife, Joan Bennett, loves him and is pretty shapely for a middle-aged mom.
• Their daughter, Gloria Talbott, is in love with the son of the owner, although the owner forbids this romance.

Although they are scoundrels, our escapees begin to feel for these poor people. Then, the store's owner (Basil Rathbone) shows up, along with his son. John Baer. Rathbone is a bully and a jerk, who plans to throw Carroll off the payroll and possibly into prison for not keeping clean books. His son, theoretically in love with Talbott, is engaged to marry the daughter of a rich shipbuilder. 

Now Bogart is a forget and confidence man. He can easily clean up the books given a little time. And if they don't get that time, the other two are murderers, and Aldo Ray is carrying around a little pet viper...

Now, Ms. Spenser loves her some herps - she has a (nonvenous) snake or two herself. So she was disappointed we didn't actually see the little viper. But she loved the the human snakes. Bogart is his usual cool, competent self, politely selling hairbrushes to a bald man and leaning on a credit customer for some cash. Ray is dumb and strong, with an eye for the ladies (and sometimes a pinch). Ustinov is lovely as a somewhat perverted, creepy criminal with a weird laugh. Of course, they're no angels - or are they. 

This would be pretty lightweight and sentimental if the three "angels" didn't have a nice edge. Ray is strong and could be menacing when women are concerned. Ustinov is creepy - he killed his wife. It was all his own fault. He should have written that he was coming home for Christmas. And of course, Bogie is Bogie. 

I'm not sure how funny this would be without these great characters, but with them, it's a Christmas murder miracle.

Nobody Who?

Well, Ms. Spenser's horror movie didn't work out so well, so we decided to be lazy and watch Nobody 2 (2025). We figured that however bad it was, it would surely satisfy.

Retired assassin and wannabe normal family man Bob Odenkirk is back on the job. The last movie put him badly in debt to the Russian mob, and he is working for Colin Salmon to pay it off. So he is unretired and overworked. His family, who now know his secret, is getting fed up with his constant absence. He needs a vacation.

He manags to convince his family to go to a cheesy waterpark and tourist town in the Wisconsin Dells, where he spent his only childhood vacation with Christopher Lloyd, Odenkirk's shady father. Of course, Lloyd will join the family outing. Odenkirk promises that he will leave the job behind, with absolutely no killing. 

So, when a bully steals a plushie from his young daughter, and his son gets into a fight over it, Odenkirk tries to stay calm. When someone smacks the girl on the head, he walks out and counts to ten. Then walks back in and kicks ass. This is not how to make friends. It turns out that the bully's father was the owner of the park, and by the way, Odenkirk has also also antagonized the sheriff, Colin Hanks. And now they are going to kill him.

Odenkirk phones his brother RZA for some intel, and finds out that the town was part of an old bootlegging route, and now being used for drug smuggling and money laundering. And it's all being run by Lendina, Sharon Stone. Remember what I said about scary old ladies? 

Of course, it all leads to a big set fight in the water park. The director is Timo Tjahjanto, Indonesian horror/action director, so these scenes are good. In fact, there's a lot of good action, but that's not all. You get some nice family interactions, with the wife wanting a quiet life, but supporting her man, and the kids thinking he's a dork for wanting a vacation in the Dells, but making the best of it and having a good time. Of course, Christopher Lloyd, a lousy father and grandfather, knows how to come through in a pinch. 

I don't think this was as much fun as the first - the gimmick works best as a surprise. But it was still a lot of fun, and a tribute to overworked dads who need a vacation everywhere. 

Blunt Weapon

Since I owed Ms. Spenser a movie, we tried a recent horror, Weapons (2025), by Zach Cregger.

It starts with a little girl telling a story in voice-over. It's about how one day, grade school teacher Julia Garner came to class and only found one boy there. It turns out that the previous night, at 2:17 AM, all the other children woke up and left their houses. They ran into the darkness with their arms out and behind them, as creepily shown on some security cameras. These children couldn't be found. The remaining boy, Cary Christopher, wasn't able to give investigators any information.

The townspeople suspected Garner of something. They painted "Witch" on her car. Her principle, Benedict Wong, put her on leave. She started drinking (again), and hooked up with her old boyfriend, patrolman Alden Ehrenreich.  She also started to investigate Christopher, who seemed to just want to be left alone. But there's something funny about his house...

The focus shifts to Josh Brolin, father of one of the missing children (one of the children who used to bully Christopher). He isn't going to rest and let the police bungle this investigation.

Again the focus shifts to Ehrenreich. We learn that he's a recovering alcoholic now married to the police chief's daughter, June Diane Raphael. He stops a meth head from breaking into a warehouse and gets a needle prick, beats up the junkie and lets him go.

And so on. The film shifts perspective, sometimes sliding the timeline back to before the disappearances. The horror starts slowly, with a lot of social and psychological stuff, with Garner being ostracized, threatened and slowly going out of control. There are hints of the supernatural, before you get a to the third act, where you discover what has been going on. 

I won't tell you what that is, but I have to mention Amy Madigan as sweet, creepy Aunt Lilly. There's something about a cheery, controlling old lady that really gets you. 

In the end, Ms. Spenser wasn't satisfied with this. It got a little silly, especially the ending, which was basically comedy-horror. So I still owe her. 

Dead Final

I made it through Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning (2025), and I enjoyed it - but I wouldn't call it good...

I don't think I'll try to recap. As you remember, in our last episode, a super-AI is taking over the world, and only Tom Cruise can stop it. I found this part of the movie very Scientology coded. The AI controls us by lying to us and trying to divide us, sow distrust through misinformation, make us fight each other. Again and again, the Impossible team try to reason with their human adversaries, offer team up for mutual benefit. Fortunately, they usually refuse, for the sake of a good action scene. 

And there are action scenes aplenty, including a frankly silly biplane fist-fight. It looked like an amazing feat of stunt-work, and just not that exciting. We also had characters aplenty, pretty much everyone from the team including recent additions Hayley Atwell and Pom Klementieff, with Shea Whigham as the son of Jim Phelps - going back to the first MI. There are also plentiful flashbacks to the whole series, and also flashbacks to points in the movie that happened while we were looking at something else. This got a bit confusing for me. At one point, Cruise and a baddy are in a discussion while the rest of the team are either in the room, or in a flashback - I'm not sure. 

There's a nice callback to an earlier movie - Rolf Saxon as a disgraced agent exiled to an Aleutian island post, where he met and fell in love with a Native woman, Lucy Tulugarjuk. It was kind of sweet, plus allowed a dramatic dogsled rescue. I think the dogs were all CGI, sadly. 

I was a little disappointed that the super-AI's manipulation of reality was a bit crude. I thought Dead Reckoning made it a little more psychedelic. Here, everyone knows what it's doing but falls for it anyway. I guess that's pretty realistic, but disappointing. However, there is a scene where the AI communicates directly to Cruise's mind in a sensory deprivation tank. When he gets out, he asks, "Is this real?" I'm still seeing Scientology influence. 

Also, Ving Rames gets killed and has a long recorded posthumous monologue. We call this a Tasha Yar. 

With a runtime of 2-2/3 hours, there was a lot of fat on this one. But of course, that means you're getting your money's worth. It also means I now owe Ms. Spenser, who skipped this entirely, at least two choices of normal length movies. 

Happy? New? Year?

Well, 2026 is getting on and I guess it's time for the year-end wrap up. In Japan, there's a tradition called Bonenkai - a Year Forgetting Party, where you gather with coworkers or classmates to forget the trials of the last year. I forgot to do that this year.

It wasn't a great movie year for us. I only blogged about 77-80 movies, the least ever. We watched more than that, but without Netflix DVDs, we have resorted to re-watching old favorites. Some of these, I even blogged about, if I had seen them first before the blog started.

We did watch a lot of recent movies - 20 from 2025, more than most years. I got to see some of the big comic book movies, which I still love, and enjoyed them, mostly. Like Thunderbolts*, Superman, and Fantastic Four. Not so much Kraven the Hunter. 

We also watched some old movies. We got the complete set of Hildegarde Withers movies, mostly starring Edna Oliver and James Gleason. Miss Withers is a tart-tongued schoolteacher who solves crimes. We also got a few Glenda Farell/Joan Blondell team ups. These are mostly about two broke party girls looking for wealth and romance, and usually ending up with one or the other. 

I also wound up watching a lot of kung fu movies. As I often mention, Ms. Spenser can't always take the night off to watch a movie. She doesn't mind if I watch one, as long as it isn't something she's interested in. So, kung fu. Some were good, some less good, none that really stuck with me. Although I did find out where Ghost Face Killer comes from. 

As a result, we didn't get to watch as many good, quality movies as we might have wanted to. I'll propose The Phoenician Scheme as my favorite. I'm not sure how good it is as a movie, but I loved it. Sinners was definitely a good movie, that we also enjoyed - maybe tied for first place. 

One trend I noticed is a bunch of Nobody clones - ordinary guy gets pushed to far, and turns out to be more dangerous than anyone imagined. Take, for ex, Novocaine, The Amateur, and Love Hurts. They were all pretty enjoyable - at least I liked them. More than a bunch of women led action movies, like Ballerina. Not that it was that bad, but it didn't raise the bar on the John Wick movies. I don't think it even cleared that bar. 

Our first movies of the New Year were the Hobbit trilogy. We'd watched them earlier this year, found them better than we remembered, and swore to watch them first thing in 2026. Done.

For cocktails, I'm actually drinking less. It just seems a little boring, and too much work. I don't mind a nice cocktail on a night out, but my consumption has dropped below three drinks a week. We'll see if that lasts. 

But I did make a celebratory cocktail: I call it the Nameless. 

• 1 shot dark rum
• 1/2 shot Galliano
• 1/2 shot lime juice
• 2 dashes Angostura bitters
• Top with sparkling wine

It's weird but I kind of liked it. Besides, I'm trying to use up a bottle of Galliano.

We'll leave it there. The state of movies seems precarious and troubled, the state of the world much more so, but I hope for a better 2026. But I'm not so naive as to think it can't get worse. 

Take Me to Church

Before I do my dubious year-end wrap up,  one final movie: Wake Up Dead Man (2025), a Knives Out sequel. 

It starts with Josh O'Connor, a young priest decking another priest. It seems he used to be a boxer until he killed a man in the ring and turned to the Church. He assigned to a lovely church in New York, Our Lady of Perpetual Whining. The head priest there is Josh Brolin, a charismatic but confrontational man. He tends to select members of the parish, call out their sins with fire and brimstone and drive them out of the church. The exceptions are his little cult:

• Jeremy Renner, a doctor whose divorce has driven him to drink
• Andrew Scott, a sci-fi writer who has stopped producing to write a true-life spiritual biography of Brolin
• Kerry Washington, a lawyer who puts loyalty to the church and her adopted son above her career
• Daryl McCormack, the adopted son, an arrogant right-wing influencer and wannabe politician
• Cailee Spaeny, a concert cellist, suffering from debilitating muscle pain, hoping for a miracle

Glenn Close plays the woman who keeps the church running, and Thomas Hayden Church the groundskeeper who worships her (and sometimes swats her bottom).

During Mass, Brolin would often become fatigued, and step into a small alcove near the altar, and O'Connor would perform the offices until he recovered. One Sunday, while he was tucked away, the congregation heard a thud. Brolin had been killed, stabbed in the back with a devil-headed knife. A devil's head that O'Connor was known to have taken from a bar.

It was a classic locked-room mystery. No one could have entered or left the alcove, no mechanism or trap was found, and O'Connor, known to be at odds with Brolin, was in plain sight the whole time. Police chief Mila Kunis did the right thing: call Benoit Blanc.

I won't go into the twists and turns of the mystery, except to say that there wasn't as much of a big mid-movie twist as I expected after Glass Onion (although there is a glorious knockout punch). I will say that the cast is awesome as usual. The characters were interesting - like in Onion, many caricatures of right-wing types. I was interested in Scott's author character - he resembled P.K. Dick in some ways: a pulpy sci-fi writer who got obsessed with Bishop Pike later in life.

It's also a beautiful movie in many ways - the neo-gothic church, the forest outside it, the cozy, yet threatening rectory. And of course, Daniel Craig's Blanc, an egotist stumped by a mystery, an atheist who granted his quarry grace, and all without losing his faith in himself and reason.

Watching this made us hungry for more - so we watched some of Branagh's Poirot. Not quite the same, but you can see the connections.