The "Dad Thriller"

Max Read offers a fascinating and amusing analysis of a 1990s genre he calls the "Dad Thriller."  It's definitely worth a read.  We wish we'd thought of it.

For example, here are some key questions to consider when deciding if a movie is a "Dad Thriller."

* Is Harrison Ford in the movie?
* Is the director Philip Noyce?
* Is there a satellite uplink?
* Is a key plot point a guy trying to get on the phone with the right guy to give him the correct information?
* Is there a shadowy cabal of lawyers and/or corporate executives?
* Is an American or English actor playing a current or former Irish Republican terrorist and attempting an unconvincing Irish accent?
* Is the main bad guy motivated by money? If he is motivated by ideology, are his politics incomprehensible and unrecognizable?
* Is the advice or warning of the movie's hero going unheeded by feckless bureaucrats?
* Is the main bad guy a former Soviet military commander?
* Is there a tense but ultimately productive exchange about race between a black guy and a white guy who are forced by circumstance to work together?
* Is the movie's hero obligated to go undertake a dangerous mission despite being an analyst, not field personnel?

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Trailer Check

Here are the seven trailers we sat through before seeing Spiderman No Way Home this past week. If each trailer runs two minutes, that's almost 20 minutes of coming attractions before the feature starts. It didn't used to be this many, did it? 

The Batman - As Mrs. Cheese Fry asked, "Why is Batman always so grim?" It's fairly amazing that Warner Bros. continues to make Batman movies. But if the audience keeps paying to see them, why stop? After a successful run with Christian Bale, we cycled to Ben Affleck and now to Robert Pattinson. We have to admit, as completely familiar and repetitive as this one seems to be, we find ourselves fairly intrigued as it seems to push the gritty, grim darkness to new depths, dialing all of that even past Chris Nolan levels. Lots of rain, fire, loud creepy music, and Bruce Wayne barking "I don't care what happens to me!" Very cool. Sigh. We're part of the problem, aren't we? 

Ambulance - The action-movie premise seems solid: desperate military veteran agrees to help a buddy pull a heist, then everything goes sideways, a cop is shot, hostages are taken, he's in over his head, yadda yadda yadda. Jake Gyllenhaal and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II are always magnetic. So far, so good. But then you'll start to notice the movie's style - it's all swooping cameras, quick cuts, artfully photographed destruction - and realize that it's directed by Michael Bay. A few of his movies are fun, like The Rock, so you're trying to maintain optimism. But then comes the title. Ambulance. Presumably titled after the getaway vehicle in the movie. It's laughably obvious and unimaginative in a way that calls to mind a fake trailer on "Saturday Night Live." Imagine Speed if it were called City Bus. 

Sonic the Hedgehog 2 - Nope. We missed the first one and surely will be unable to follow this second chapter. We hope James Marsden was well paid. 

Death on the Nile - A sequel of sorts to Kenneth Branagh's Murder on the Orient Express (which was pretty good), it doesn't seem to be a particularly exciting movie. The marketing department won't like hearing that. But the A-list cast is stacked, the Agatha Christie name carries the promise of a sophisticated plot, the setting seems exotic and luxurious, and no one will be shooting lasers. 

Crypto.com - So Matt Damon (we hope he was well paid) is telling us with a straight face that the bravery of mountain climbers, astronauts, and - get this - the Wright Brothers is very much the same sort of bravery needed to invest in the volatile emerging market of cryptocurrency, which is mostly for now a way for rich people to get richer. Got it. 

Uncharted - We're just happy to see a big budget thriller that isn't an adaptation of a Marvel comic book or 1990s video game.**  It certainly looks it's trying to emulate the treasure-hunting heroics of the Indiana Jones movies, but who knows? We're told that Mark Wahlberg can be polarizing, but we certainly like him. The trailer ends with an amazing "how will he get out of that?" cliffhanger moment that makes a huge impression. 

**Update: we have since learned that this movie is indeed based on a series of video games.  But of course it is.  So then, our only non-adapted film from this group is... Ambulance?

Morbius - At the risk of sounding like an old man hunched in a lawn chair yelling at tween skateboarders, this is what's wrong with Hollywood (or, to be fair, what's wrong with moviegoers). Another obscure Marvel character, another tedious origin story, another superpower action movie with a too-big CGI effects budget. Further demerits because it looks like the hero (antihero, whatever) is a vampire. Please, no one go see this. And yes, we certainly see the irony of our endorsement of the new Batman reboot all the while trashing this one. We're not proud of that.

To further explore this question of audiences only responded to movies based on existing IP, we looked at domestic box office for 2019 - we won't look at 2020 or 2021 since the pandemic disrupted everything.   And yes, we know Hollywood now turns on worldwide box office, but for the sake of argument, let's only consider American audiences.  As the great film journalist Scott Mendelson likes to say, audiences who complain about comic book movies need to actually, like, pay to see non-comic book movies when they get made.  Hollywood responds to what audiences pay to see.  Be sure to go see the movies you want to see more of.

So in 2019 you'd have to go all the way down to Jordan Peele's Us (#12 at the box office, earning $175 million) to find a movie not based on either a comic book or a previous movie.  After that, it's Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood (#18, $141 million).  So out of the top 20 movies, only two were original, though one could argue that Peele and Tarantino are sort of a brand of their own.  In which case, there's Knives Out at #21 earning $115 million.

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Six Thoughts About Netflix's "The Squid Game"

1. Unless you've been living under a rock, you know the basics of this show.  The premise is an engaging high-concept variation of a familiar plot: for their own amusement, the rich and/or elite get the unwashed masses to fight to the death.  The Hunger Games was played straight, but those movies didn't come close to this kind of exhausted, grim hopelessness.  The marbles episode packs a devastating punch.  It's not a particularly fun experience.
2. We're not familiar with the style and format of Korean television.  Are all K-dramas this overwrought?  The villains are complete one-note caricatures, one all obnoxious bug eyes, the other sneering and scowling through every scene.
3. "Netflix bloat" is a real thing and, frankly, we're tired of it.  This show runs nine episodes (most of them almost an hour long) when the story could have easily been streamlined and told in four.  Just about every twist and turn gets talked to death by the characters, dragging the plot out to absurd lengths.
4. We suggest watching it in the original Korean with English subtitles.  Don't rely on the histrionic English actor voice dub that makes like it play like a bad episode of "Star Blazers."
5. As fascinating as it is to consider an underground death game sponsored by billionaires, the logistics here are utterly implausible.  Over 400 hundred people die in this first season, all of them seemingly with families and friends and living in big cities like Seoul.  They will be missed.  But, okay, this can maybe work.  Oh, but the contestants can vote to end the game, so it's possible that you have hundreds of people out there alive who know about the game and could talk.  Hmm.  Okay, we'll go with it.  But it's a bridge too far when later we learn this contest has been happening for years.  That's thousands of people who just vanish, their bodies disposed of in secret, and no one starts asking questions except for a single police officer?
6. In the end, we're trying to puzzle out the point to it all.  There's some dark themes about the "it's either you or me" evil people will do to survive, of course, and the resilience of the human spirit in the face of death.  There are also some last-minute meditations on wealth and classism that might have resonated better had they been introduced sooner.  And then there's the epilogue, which suggests that despite winning, victory for the surviving character was a hollow one.  The character won, but they're broken.   The end most definitely did not justify the means.  Again, that's an interesting notion but one that could have maybe been clearer.  It's all mushy, which seems inexcusable given the producers had nine hours to make it less mushy.  Then again, as a Cheese Fry colleague suggested to us, this show may have been more about the morality of the game rather than the arcs and journeys of the contestants.

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Knee-jerk review: "Ghostbusters Afterlife"

* Paul Rudd is never not a delight, but the real find here is 15-year-old McKenna Grace.  The whole thing rests on her lead performance and she 100% delivers.
* We highly recommend that you watch the original first.  There's a number of connections to that 1984(!) movie, both subtle winks and big plot points.  You'll want to refresh your memory.  It will help.
* The explanation for the strange earthquakes was quite ingenious.
* On one hand, we certainly appreciate the idea of making a direct sequel to the original and engaging longtime fans.  We saw that movie twice in theaters in the summer of 1984 (most likely at the dearly departed United Artists Walnut Hill 6) and had a movie poster thumbtacked to our bedroom door. The exciting sequences of the kids strapping on proton packs, driving the Ecto-1, and even (gasp) zipping into Ghostbuster jumpsuits are the very definition of "fan fiction."
* On the other hand, remember how The Force Awakens was sort of a narrative re-do of A New Hope? The plot here not only covers similar beats to the original movie, it completely undermines the Ghostbusters' "cross the streams!" Central Park victory all those years ago.
* We don't want to spoil anything, but surely you've heard by now that some original Ghostbusters actors make cameos.  It's an awkward bit of business that borders on embarrassing.  Some of them really don't look like they want to be there.  One in particular.  We wonder who twisted their arm.
* The CGI Stay Puft marshmallow men gag is completely hilarious and charming.  And also completely forced and unnecessary, existing solely to be hilarious and charming.
* The emotional ending makes sense in a lot of ways, and we know the filmmakers got everyone onboard and were completely respectful.  You'll know the moment when you see it. But it's also a little but icky.
* It's fun, yeah, but it's also kind of a slog.  You'll likely be way ahead of the movie and subsequently tapping your foot impatiently waiting for the story to hurry up and just get there.
* Who you gonna call?

Israel Daramola has a great take on the current state of tentpole sequels like Afterlife at The Ringer.

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Knee-jerk review: "Old"

 1. We'd seen some mixed reviews, so weren't sure what to think.  All in all, a pleasant surprise.

2. The camerawork is top-notch, always gliding and roving and swooping.  It gives the action an unsettled, queasy vibe.  Like all good horror movies, what the camera shows is often just as important as what it doesn't.

3. We love Ken Leung.  

4. How are we supposed to post something about this film without revealing all kinds of spoilers?

5. The first half hour or so is something of a master class in incongruously creating a sense of dread out of the lush trappings of a fancy tropical resort.

6. It's a genius premise, the sort that makes one wonder why someone didn't make a movie like this sooner.  Fear of getting old, of mortality, of losing one's youthful vigor - those are universal worries.  The movie strikes a particularly poignant chord as well for parents everywhere dealing with the inevitable march of time as kids get older and older.
  Time is precious, don't wish your life away, carpe diem.  We often spout these pithy aphorisms, but how often do we really grasp what they mean?
7. We could totally believe there could be a well-known hip hop artist named Mid-Sized Sedan.

8. What is it about M. Night Shyamalan always wanting to put himself in his movies?  And a lot of times, it's not some Hitchcock-style character, it's a fairly large supporting role.

9. We think there's something significant or symbolic in the name of the report our characters visit, but we can't figure out what that might be.

10. Not only is it a fairly simple-yet-brilliant premise (if you've seen the TV spots you know all you really to need to know), the movie does a great job exploring it from a number of different angles.
  Aside from one horror movie gross-out scene towards the end, the film plays everything fairly straight.
11. Definitely a "Lost" vibe with creepy supernatural goings-on in a beautiful tropical setting.  Ken Leung's presence underscores that parallel.

12. There's some nice foreshadowing going on in the opening scenes.  It's a bit overt, yes, but it works.  We've heard people complain about M. Night's dialogue, but look at the crazy plots of his movies - these are big stories about very strange things.  Quiet subtlety and sly subtext wouldn't necessarily work.  His movies aren't about gritty realism and high-minded drama.
13. The ending stretches credulity - sometimes weird stories don't need everything tied up in a neat little bow - but it's still satisfying.

14. Wikipedia tells us the movie cost $18 million, which really is the perfect price tag.
15. Yeah, it's "only" PG-13, but it's a dark movie, people.


16. One big takeaway: if your swanky  resort offers to send you to a secret and secluded "no trespassing" beach, politely decline.

Our revised, ranked list of M. Night movies:

1. The Sixth Sense (1999), obviously

2. Unbreakable (2000)

3. The Visit (2015) literally gave us chills in a couple of moments

4. Old (2021)
5. Signs (2002) ridiculous ending and all

6. Split (2016)

7. The Village (2004), like most of his movies, has an ending that you just sort of have to go with

8. The Happening (2008) probably should get begrudging admiration for so audaciously tackling so looney a premise
9. Lady in the Water (2006) is better forgotten

We never saw The Last Airbender (2010), After Earth (2013), or Glass (2019).

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Knee-jerk review: "F9"

1. At this point, it's all fairly ridiculous, isn't it?
2. Two of the characters actually go into orbit, people.  It's totally crazy.
3. No matter the role, Michelle Rodriguez is just always so surly looking, like someone just killed her dog.
4. There's this weird structure where the action grinds to a halt for these gag scenes with Tyrese Gibson and Ludacris trading comic insults.  It sometimes seems like they're in a whole other movie.
5. Vin Diesel gets a crazy sequence where he goes into superhero berserker mode and fights off, like, a whole squadron of soldiers with his bare hands.
6. Bonus points: the movie has a lot of fun with some giant electromagnets during a lengthy set-piece car chase.  This is why we see these movies.
7. John Cena is pretty terrible here, making us wonder if he's better served in parts with a lighter, more comic sensibility.  He can be pretty funny.
8. We do appreciate the effort to expand the story tapestry and go back to Dom's youth to explore the death of his father, which adds a nice Shakespearean vibe to the whole thing.  That said, it's completely ballsy to ask audiences to believe that two auto racer brothers became estranged, followed totally different life paths, yet ended up both becoming James Bond-style super spies.  What?!  (And no, it doesn't work to hand-wave all of this insanity away by suggesting Kurt Russell's Mr. Nobody character engineered the whole thing.)
9. If you only watched the more recent Fast movies, packed full of machine guns and electronic gadgets and world travel and melodramatic villains looking to rule the world, you'd assume this was a franchise about secret agents.  Let us remind you: these characters started out as Los Angeles blue collar street racers.  Did we mention these movies are nuts?
10. To us, the best one is 2011's Fast Five which starts with a prison break and ends with two cars dragging giant stolen banks vaults down a city street.  It's the Goldfinger of Fast movies, just the right mix of realism and wacko.
11. Paul Walker's absence throws everything off kilter (although in the world of the story he's still alive, just off-screen).  He and Diesel's bromance was the heart of the franchise.
12. As over the top as all of this is, we cannot deny the movie's soul.  Over and over, throughout the entire franchise, the characters (most of whom are not related) talk about the importance of family, risking their lives for each other, ending their adventures with communal dinners and cold beer toasts.  Lots of Hollywood movies involve some sort of makeshift family, but few wear that notion on their sleeve like these movies do.

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Observations from a Minor League Baseball Game

The Cheese Fry family recently visited a local Double-A baseball park to watch a game.  It's been well over two years - if not more - since our last visit, and while the kids grumbled and whined about going ("Three hours long?!") there were conversations on the way home about where to sit on the next visit.  The consensus seemed to be the outfield grass, which is fine with us - it's half as expensive as the infield seats.

* It's not a baseball game unless you eat a steamed hot dog ($5) wrapped up in that paper foil sheet and slathered in enough room temperature mustard to make your fingers yellow.

* All baseball games require multiple discussions of how long it will take sun to move behind the upper deck and give you the sweet relief of shadow.

* Our row was completely empty, at least 20 seats curving out to the right in our section, but we had one guy sitting right next to us.  Why?  Also: who attends a baseball game all alone?

* We don't what that mascot was supposed to be.  Sort of a giant beaver, but also orange and yellow and shaggy like a Muppet.  Whatever it was, it wore a number 2 jersey.

* There's a low-key ritual involved with baseball field preparations that can be soothing to witness.  Raking the infield, drawing the chalk lines, hosing down the infield dirt, placing the bases.  It's a ballpark reset. What's happened before doesn't matter.  What's important is now.  What happens next.  On the diamond tonight, which is being freshly assembled and cleaned and groomed just for us, anything is possible.  Anything can happen.

* We still don't fully understand the difference between the OBP and the batting average.

* At any sporting event, people-watching of course can be just as engaging at what's happening on the field.  While we secretly judged the bad tattoos, the inappropriately dressed teen girls, and the couples who didn't look like they belonged together, the winner on that evening surely went to the two old timers sitting right behind us who didn't shut up for seven innings.  Their loud running commentary most notably included a discussion of Lee Harvey Oswald's rifle and shooting skill.  They also had comments about a player named Luken.  "Why not just drop the N and go by Luke?"

* Honorable mention to the huge group one section over.  This was the boisterous relatives and friends of one of the visiting team players, all of whom cheered and shouted whenever he was on the field.  (To his credit, he hit a lead off double.)

* An post-game fireworks show allowed us to sit on the outfield grass.  Thick grass, but clipped very short.  Scratchy, not soft.  And yet, not as flawless as it might look from a distance.  We saw some divots and bald spots.

* Another baseball game essential food item: the bag of salted peanuts ($3.50).  Nowhere else can you make that big of a mess on the floor and then just walk away with a shrug.

* Scoreboards have come a long way in our lifetime.  Gone are the crude message boards made up of incandescent light bulb grids.  Now it's all gigantic flatscreen TVs.  We particularly marveled at a real-time update of the opposing pitcher's ERA as he gave up several runs in the middle of the game.

* Not a fan of the row of urinals without privacy barriers, people.

* Whoever ran the sound board was earning their paycheck.  An endless, wall to wall string of audio drops, music cues, and sound effects.  Is that person following a rigid script or just selecting on the fly what to play and when to play it?  Bonus points for the "Price Is Right" loser cue after a strikeout.

* Stadium was maybe half full, so the half-hearted attempt to start the Wave fizzled quickly.

* We often daydream about what sort of song we'd want played for us if we were a player walking up to the plate.  In those 10 seconds, how would you define yourself?  You could go the obvious route and play something hard and heavy like AC/DC.  Or you could go goofy, maybe play "Mmmbop" or "Margaritaville."  Or you could go instrumental and maybe pick the "Game of Thrones" theme or that Alan Parsons Project song "Sirius" that the Chicago Bulls made famous.  We'd probably end up picking some cheesy 80s song like "Your Love" by the Outfield.  The Outfield.  Get it?  Baseball?

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Five bite-sized movie reviews

* Army of the Dead boasts the sort of high concept logline you expect to get pitched over martinis in Hollywood: "a Las Vegas heist thriller with zombies."  The idea probably should have died there.  As much as we love Dave Bautista's wounded weariness in any role, this is a movie ripping off ideas, characters, conflicts - and even entire story beats - from other, better movies.  But the most egregious sin for us is the sinking feeling that the filmmakers are giggling at the audience by arbitrarily killing off characters just because they can.  In the end, it's pointless, grim, and unsatisfying.

* Awake is pretty terrible. It feels cheap, rushed, and totally undercooked. While the idea that a global phenomenon preventing sleep might lead to social chaos and insanity is somewhat intriguing, what should maybe take a couple of weeks to play out here takes about 24 hours: after a single night of no sleep, the world totally falls apart and a church of wild-eyed wackos is ready to sacrifice a young girl who was able to sleep the previous night.  It's that kind of movie, chock full of underdeveloped drama and supporting characters that come and go at random.  Ugh.

* Greenland stars Gerard Butler, which typically signals a cheesy, B-movie aesthetic of big thrills on a low budget.  We were pleasantly surprised that this film delivers genuine edge and grit.  Post-9/11 and post-"Walking Dead,' we've all seen countless iterations of "end of the world" stories, but this one works hard to create a sense of realistic panic and dread.  It's easy to buy that this scary breakdown of law and order and morality is exactly how things would go if the world suddenly realized that a planet-killer comet was only two days away.  It's a Gerard Butler movie, so you get the required eye-rolling moments of happenstance and coincidence, but it packs a punch.

* In the Heights is certainly an exuberant and vivid movie. Recent casting controversy aside, there's a lot of fun to be had soaking up the story's Caribbean Latin culture and spending time with these likable characters, all of them hungering for a better life. The issue is that aside from a dreamy dance on the side of a building and a fantastic showstopper number at a city pool, there's a surprising flatness to the action. It just doesn't hit the mark. None of the songs are particularly earwormy, there's no clear antagonist to create conflict, and the story rambles on for about 45 minutes too long. We wanted to like it more than we did. 

* Tenet, like all Christopher Nolan films, can give you a headache as you try to understand just what exactly is going on.  The idea of an "inversion" machine that makes time run backwards is undeniably clever and unique - especially in those truly weirdo, nonsensical moments when forwards and backwards characters cross paths - but that doesn't mean it makes for a clear story. There are some undeniably memorable moments, but in the end, the movie feels like more of a mental exercise of plot mechanics than an effective drama. That is, it's all head and no heart.

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Remote Control Inventory

When we were growing up, the family television was a big Magnavox cabinet with a little black metal wireless remote control that beeped when you pushed the buttons.  How cool is that blue "power" button?  Around third grade or so, the family updated to Qube cable.  Not only did we suddenly now get dozens more channels, but we also got a fancy wired remote control.  

Our personal little 13-inch color TV - the one that went with us to California in the mid-90s - had no such space-age luxury.  That little TV (which weighed way more than it looked) sported an actual hand-crank channel dial.  When's the last time you saw one of those?  A knob for VHF and a knob for UHF.  Tuning in your channel was always accompanied by that satisfying plastic clack-clack-clack. This was also the age of newspaper TV guides before onscreen lists were ever a thing, but that's for another blog ost.

Flash forward 30 years to a family coffee table wire basket filled with remote controls.  These are not the dusty remotes we all have that go untouched.  The list below, for example, does not include the PlayStation 3 remote that gets dusted off every so often whenever someone wants to play a game or watch a Bluray DVD, nor does the list include the even more dusty remotes that go to unplugged DVD players and VHS decks and even an original Tivo-branded DVR stacked neatly in a back closet.  Those remotes are all stashed away out of sight.

No, the four remotes in the basket see frequent use.  Multiple scrapes and dog-tooth marks are proof.  

1. DirecTV - This is the granddaddy, the big gray plastic beast that controls channel selection and play functions for the built-in DVR.  The biggest frustration with this one - aside from a perpetual need to replace the batteries - is the fact that, even as bulky and colorful as it is, it's easy to mix up the buttons.  Invariably, when watching a DVRd show, we go to push "pause" but instead accidentally push "exit" and get zapped back to the main menu, requiring multiple steps to drill down into the right menu and resume the recording.  Profanity in these situations is unavoidable.

2. Vizio TV - This remote has endless rows of tiny rubber buttons with nooks and crannies that trap filth and grime, but we really only use two buttons - the one that turns the flatscreen on and off and the one that lets us toggle between video inputs.

3. Vizio soundbar - In theory, we were all excited to connect the new fancy soundbar to our iPhones to play music via Bluetooth, turning our living room into a hip, funky hangout with a 21st century digital jukebox.  And yet, we've used that feature... maybe five times in two years.  Note also: whatever you do, please do not attempt to adjust the volume with any remote other than this one.  You'll just mess everything up.

4. Amazon Fire Stick - This is a late addition to the basket, only arriving last fall.  But it's certainly made up for lost time and has very much become a fan favorite.  At this point, the Cheese kids probably consider  streaming platforms like Amazon, Netflix, and Disney+ as "TV" more than traditional outlets like ABC, NBC, or even old school cable stations like TBS.  Our big irritation here is the remote's size.  It's barely bigger than a pack of chewing gum.  It's also one of those remotes trying to be clever with just four or five buttons that do everything.  Even better, it's surprisingly difficult to remember which button is the "pause" button - remember that this is a family that sits still for nothing, so we have to frequently stop the action for popcorn making, for dog wrangling, for bathroom going, for blanket adjusting... the list goes on forever - especially when the Cheese family insists on a pitch black living room to watch anything, which means that we're unable to actually look at the remote to help us remember which tiny recessed plastic nub is the right one. 

This surely sounds familiar to all of the readers out there.  Every viewing experience requires a complex series of inputs and adjustments across multiple remote controls.  Good luck finding them all when you need them.  The sofa is black, the remotes are black, the room is dark.  When we booked a house sitter years ago, the directions we had to create for TV operation looked like technical specs in their flowchart if/then confusion.

You can tell Generation X by our nostalgic affection for those handcrank dials.

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