1. We'd long assumed we'd seen Home Alone before. But watching it in its entirety last week, we realized that we have not seen Home Alone before. Not all the way through anyway. More than one scene we had zero recollection of ever seeing before.
2. People, Joe Pesci's burglar character is also a Chicago police officer. The whole movie is an inside job, crooked cop story. Spoiler alert.
3. The McCallister family really treats little Kevin horribly. He's banished to the third floor attic like a hostage for a chain reaction series of accidents sparked by his obnoxious bully brother who's in dire need of an ass kicking. Note that this bully brother is not sent to the attic.
4. The whole thing is sort of charming in a goofy 1980s sort of way, we suppose, ladling on plenty of feel-good sentiment and emotion to hide the utter implausibility of it all.
5. Why doesn't Kevin call the police? We didn't notice this plot hole until another critic recently made the joking suggestion that the McCallister dad must be a mob lawyer who's told his family to never engage with law enforcement.
6. We all know why the movie was a hit: those last 15 minutes when the movie turns into a Looney Tunes cartoon and delivers hilariously satisfying booby-trap cartoon violence on these two despicable criminals. All these years later - this is the part we've definitely seen again and again - it's still a fantastic showstopper ending.
7. Remember that the Daniel Stern burglar purposely leaves the sink faucet turned on in the houses he burglarizes, which is incredibly mean. He deserves that iron (and paint can) to the face.
8. The most interesting thing about the movie to us is the fact that the old 1940s noir that plays a pivotal role in the plot - something called Angels with Filthy Souls - is completely made up. The single scene you see in the movie ("Keep the change, ya filthy animal.") was created by the Home Alone filmmakers. Genius.
9. Is it sacrilege to admit we never really got the appeal of John Candy? Probably.
10. Catherine O'Hara's character wonders in the movie if she's a bad mom for leaving one of her kids behind when the family flies to Europe. The answer, of course, is 100% "yes, you are."
11. One of the lingering images of the movie is Macaulay Culkin slapping aftershave on his face, then screaming in pain. Hardee har har. But it's the scraping of a razor that makes one's face vulnerable to the sting of aftershave. Kevin didn't shave, so why is the Brut burning his face? It's kind of symbolic of the whole movie - go for the joke or the gag whether it makes sense or not.
12. Remember the 20th century when people could only connect over long distances via voice over the telephone? No e-mail, no texting, no Facetime. If someone didn't answer your call or if you didn't have a phone handy, you were out of luck. The plot of this movie couldn't work in 2023.
13. When it comes to holiday movies, we prefer Elf, A Christmas Story, National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation, A Charlie Brown Christmas, and White Christmas. (FYI we recently rewatched Love Actually - it hasn't aged great.)
12.25.2023
Holiday knee-jerk review: "Home Alone"
12.19.2023
Knee-jerk review: "Wonka"
1. We weren't necessarily interested. This was a Cheese Fry family decision.
2. And yet... we're happy to report that it's a whimsical delight on every level. Top notch.
3. Family lore has it that Roald Dahl's Charlie and Chocolate Factory was the first book of fiction we read, circa 4th grade in 1982. The 1971 movie with Gene Wilder is certainly memorable and embraces Dahl's crueler instincts ("You're turning violet, Violet!"), while the 2005 Tim Burton/Johnny Depp movie is the sort of oddball visual spectacle - fun, yes, but also kind of cold and remote - you'd expect from those two.
4. Bonus points for avoiding the obvious angle of forcing Willy Wonka to have some kind of love interest. If there's another popular literary character who's this asexual, we don't know who it might be.
5. The Victorian-era, Dickensian look and feel of the movie is fully developed and wholly immersive. This is a fairy tale world of dirty street orphans (and the rich snobs who hate them), rundown boarding houses, and secret getaways using giant city sewer pipes.
6. That is to say, don't go here looking for gritty realism.
7. We're not much of a Timothee Chalamet fan (the same can most definitely not be said for the older Cheese Fry daughter, who muttered "he's so fine" on the car ride home), but he's pitch perfect here. Is Wonka a genius in on the joke of it all or a weirdo who's completely clueless?
8. We didn't love the business with the giraffe, but we acknowledge it provided a moment for Wonka and his teenaged sidekick Noodle to bond.
9. The quirky plot turns and magic realism details were more than enough to make this movie work, but we appreciate the filmmakers' effort in digging a little deeper into the backstories of Wonka and Noodle, both lonely orphans dreaming of seeing their mother again. The ending provided an unexpected emotional catharsis.
10. We will never forget the phrase "Yeti sweat."
11. Hugh Grant's Oompa Loompa is, of course, awesome. Plus for the hardcore fans we get a cute call back to the Oompa Loompa-related flute riff from the Gene Wilder movie.
12. We were a little disappointed the Everlasting Gobstopper didn't make an appearance. Maybe that's something for the next movie, which we're very much interested in seeing.
13. We didn't immediately recognize the name of writer-director Paul King and for that, we are embarrassed. He's also responsible for the two Paddington movies (20014 and 2017), which are similarly polished and winning. He's got the goods.
12.09.2023
Knee-jerk review: "The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes"
Full disclosure: We saw this movie more than a couple of weeks ago but only]now found the time to submit for your approval a "Knee-jerk review."
1. We found the book sort of "meh." And so guess what? The movie's also sort of "meh."
2. Panem is certainly an interesting dystopian world, but the more you think about it, the more illogical and ridiculous it all is. Don't look too closely, in other words.
3. Rachel Zegler completely steals the movie as the charismatic tribute Lucy Gray. Probably not as impressive a feat as you might imagine given the wet blanket performance by Tom Blyth as Coriolanus Snow, the film's supposed protagonist.
4. Were audiences really curious to know how and why the evil President Snow from the original Hunger Games trilogy (tetralogy since the last book spanned two movies - remember when that was a thing?) turned bad? We get that the "how'd it happen?" exercise likely excited author Suzanne Collins, but the whole thing works very hard to answer a question no one was asking.
5. There are some interesting political and classism issues bubbling under the surface, like Snow's desperate attempt to hide his poverty from his snobby affluent friends. His determination to rise above his station in life is probably the movie's most relatable element.
6. The story behind the actual invention of the Hunger Games - which we get here only through dialogue about things that happened long before the events of the movie - might have been more compelling.
7. No doubt Viola Davis is having a great time. She's in full diva mode here, chewing up the scenery and sporting that actor's prop delight - crazy contact lenses.
8. The snakes-that-recognize-scents thing is pretty cool.
9. The real kicker is that after you sit through a whole lot of plot and action and conflict and characters to see this movie's edition of the Hunger Games play out, which was more or less satisfying, the story shifts gears into a new setting and keeps going for another 45 minutes. Most troubling, the big heel turn for Snow is crammed into the last 20 minutes. That dark chain of events felt so rushed and unmotivated, in fact, that we had to conduct a family debriefing on the car ride home to work out just what exactly happened. It took all of us to piece it together.
10. Of course the movie has to find a way to namecheck Katniss Everdeen, a character who won't be born for another 30 years or so. Eye roll.
11. It's well done, goes through the paces, yadda yadda. It's fine.
From the archives, here's our original review of The Hunger Games from 2012.
11.13.2023
Knee-jerk review: "The Marvels"
1. By now we should know that negative online chatter about a movie before it even comes out often times has little -- if anything -- to do with the actual quality of the movie. Too many "critics" have axes to grind. Did the chatter predict the underwhelming box office performance or did the chatter sort of cause the underwhelming box office performance?
2. The real problem, of course, is overall Marvel fatigue - a mix of market oversaturation and increasingly overlapping and complicated plots. Right or wrong, it looks like The Marvels is going to be the poster child of that growing disinterest. It had to happen eventually. Did Disney and Marvel really think the gravy train would never end?
3. The movie is very much... okay. Fun at times. But it certainly could have been much, much better and more satisfying with a sharper execution.
4. For example, there's a lot of good conflict and drama to be mined from Kamala meeting her idol Captain Marvel. Kamala's room is covered in Captain Marvel stuff; it borders on creepy stalker obsession and it's a fun moment when Captain Marvel sees it. But aside from a couple of quick lines along the way here and there, the movie just sort of glosses over the whole thing. Why?
5. The whole movie, in fact, feels glossed over and rushed. If you're going to tell this story... take a moment and, like, tell it right.
6. The opening is rocky as the movie wades through a lot of backstory exposition to bring everyone up to speed. We had a sinking "uh oh" moment about ten minutes in. (As you may have heard, two of the three leads were introduced in Disney+ TV shows which presumably limits how much wide audiences might know about them. The opening almost plays like a lengthy "previously on" intro to a complicated TV drama.)
7. But once the three Marvels team up, things perk up considerably.
8. Iman Vellani as Kamala Khan steals the whole movie. Her starstruck teenager energy shines. The "Ms. Marvel" TV show worked because of her wide-eyed charisma.
9. In fact, we sort of wished the movie had just pushed everything further and fully embraced the comedy and farce of the body-switching premise. Aside from one inspired montage where the women learn to control the switching, the movie doesn't really take advantage of its own fun gimmick. (Worse, the rules of the switching aren't clearly explained.)
10. Another example of missed opportunities: there a planet where everyone wears flashy, bright colors and sings instead of speaks. We suspected we were about to see a full-on Bollywood style dance sequence. Alas, it didn't happen.
11. Apparently, the Flerken alien cats are polarizing. Some people actually don't like them? But we found the cats pretty funny and provided some unexpected plot turns.
12. We've had enough of the Skrulls and the Kree, thank you very much.
13. Ditto climactic duels of CGI laser beams. Ugh.
14. The villain's plot is unusual, but she's just not very memorable. Don't these kind of things need brash, scenery-chewing bad guys?
15. The credits tag is as delightful as it is completely inevitable.
16. Our Brie Larson crush persists.
17. At some point, Sam Jackson needs to write a tell-all book about the years and years he's spent across TV and film playing the same Nick Fury character.
8.12.2023
Why We Hate This Cinemark Spot
The Cheese Fry's local movie theater is a Cinemark. It's ten minutes away, so we go to the same one every time. (We prefer row C, the last row in the front section so there's no chance a noisy talker sits behind us.)
Cinemark's trailer packet before the movie always, always features this ridiculous spot pushing the theater's concessions app. We hate it. It's not just because we have to sit through those 30 seconds of hell every time we see a Cinemark movie, although that can't help. We hated this spot the very first time we saw it. Let us explain why.
* Look at these people's absurd reactions - in slow motion no less, an accompanied by some kind of aria to further heighten the psuedo-drama of it all - to whatever they're seeing. Wide eyes. Slack jaws. Bouncing and pointing. Hands over mouths. Laughter. Also tears. The dude who throws up his arms signaling a touchdown. What a douche. Can you imagine him sitting next to you? We don't think audiences from the 1910s who saw a movie for the very time in their entire lives had these sorts of over the top, bug-eyed, cartoon responses.
3. DiCaprio's shocking murder in The Departed
4. The big ghost twist at the end of The Sixth Sense
Huge, unexpected moments, but none of these inspired us to throw our popcorn bucket in the air.
Knee-jerk review: "Barbie"
1. In portraying the world where Barbies all live, the film displays a wildly whimsical, surreal streak that's pretty striking. It's like nothing really that we've ever seen. The cinematography and production sign are beautiful, somehow conveying "plastic toy" at every turn. It's a technical master class.
2. The storyline got a little messy towards the end as the Barbies and Kens try to find a way to live in harmony.
3. But there is no denying that Barbie delivers sharp - at times vicious - satire on gender roles and gender inequity.
4. It's the kind of meticulously layered, smart, purposeful movie that reminds us film can be art. Nothing on screen feels haphazard or throwaway.
5. Plenty of what seem to be Barbie toy inside jokes went way over our head. It's pretty impressive that Mattel was okay with making fun of some of the doll's embarrassing misfires over the years. Usually corporations are fairly humorless about themselves.
6. Margot Robbie, as always, is fantastic. What other A-list actress could credibly play Barbie? As they say, casting is often half the battle.
7. That said, it's Ryan Gosling's Ken that has more of a complicated, dynamic role to play and he eats it up.
8. It makes narrative sense to go to Mattel headquarters, sure, but beyond that the movie didn't really know what to do with Will Farrell and the Mattel board of directors.
9. We would have preferred spending more time in the real world. Seeing Barbie and Ken walking the streets of Santa Monica and Venice is pretty hilarious.
10. Disappointing that the mother-daughter relationship felt so undercooked.
11. The movie's last line is a home run. Fantastic.
12. We don't understand the visceral reaction from some critics who've called the movie anti-men. The movie sort of goes out of its way to suggest that both genders are just as willing to oppress the other if given the chance. A society that makes men subservient is just as wrong as one that makes women subservient. It take selfless work to level the playing field.
13. In other words, yes, it's a pro-feminist movie, but so what?
14. And if you think "patriarchal" is some phony, make-believe, liberal arts concept, you're not seeing our world as it is.
15. America Ferrara delivers a passionate monologue towards the end that felt a little preachy to us, but it resonated with Ms. Fry so clearly the movie is onto something.
16. A movie that feels fresh and clever and important at a time when so many summer movies feel like pointless, underwhelming retreads.
7.30.2023
Knee-jerk review: "Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One"
1. That title is a mouthful, huh?
2. The finale with the train, as you may have heard, is a total knockout. What an ending.
3. All of the more recent Mission: Impossible movies - that is, everything that came after the J.J. Abrams' very decent Mission: Impossible III - are fantastic and thrilling, but also mostly interchangeable. Don't ask us to explain the plots (or even the nonsensical titles that sound cool but rarely describe the movies) because most of us know by now that the storylines exist solely to connect the big action set pieces.
4. We must deduct points for the fact that these movies eventually fall back on the "agents gone rogue" premise so that our heroes have to execute their impossible mission while evading both the bad guys and also the good guys who Don't Understand What's Really Going On.
5. We love that the Mission: Impossible films always include a TV-show-style credit sequence with the theme song blasting and lots of quick action cuts of the movie we're about to see, as if it's something we just tuned into on ABC in 1974. It always gives us goosebumps.
6. We honestly could not follow the plot here. Eventually, we gave up trying to work out who was doing what to who and why. Spy movies can be complicated, sure, but it's not good when they're totally obtuse.
7. The cruciform key gimmick was clever, though.
8. Strange that someone so familiar with Impossible Mission Force shenanigans would fall for the mask gimmick, which is surely the IMF's most renowned trick.
9. As smart as these movies can be, we still have a hard time watching Ving Rhames and Simon Pegg hack any system anywhere in the world at will with just a few keystrokes.
10. No spoilers, but the way the movie callously disposes of a heretofore key member of the team felt to us not only completely pointless but disrespectful to the character. We're hoping the next movie somehow rectifies that.
11. New movie star crush: Hayley Atwell.
12. A lot was made in the marketing about this supposed death-defying motorcycle/parachute stunt that Tom Cruise performs for the movie. We don't doubt the danger or the skill required, but viewed in the scope of everything we've seen in this franchise and considered from a purely visual perspective, that jump might not even crack the top ten Mission: Impossible stunt moments. It's impressive, but we didn't get a sense it was somehow unprecedented or historical when we saw it.
13. Cruise is 61 now and getting a little long in the tooth for this sort of thing, but there's no reason he can't start to take a more passive mentor role in the franchise, recruiting and teaching a new generation of heroes.
14. The filmmakers did Rebecca Ferguson's character wrong. Not cool.
15. It's pretty good, but not great. It's the first Mission: Impossible movie from writer-director Christopher McQuarrie (this is his third) that doesn't feel like a slam dunk.
Our current rankings:
1. Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol (2011) - the one where Tom Cruise climbed the skyscraper
2. Mission: Impossible - Fallout (2018) - the one with the dueling helicopters
3. Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation (2015) - the one with the opera assassination attempt
4. (tie) Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One (2023) - the one with the train ending
4. (tie) Mission: Impossible III (2006) - the one with the Rabbit's Foot MacGuffin
6. Mission: Impossible (1996) - the one with Tom Cruise suspended over the floor
7. Mission: Impossible 2 (2000) - the one that John Woo directed
7.03.2023
Knee-jerk review: "Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny"
1. It's pretty good. Definitely an upgrade from 2008's Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, which was a complete mess. This one should have been the fourth one.
2. We really don't understand the bad reviews. Were expectations too high?
3. The biggest criticism we could maybe offer is the whole question of why it was made. But should that sort of thing factor into a review of the quality of the finished film? Should critics focus only on the art or should they take into account the narrative surrounding how and why the art was created?
4. The movie certainly embraces Harrison Ford's age (he's 80). We noticed several shots of Indy walking away from the camera linger on his old man shuffle-limp and there's more than one scuffle that a younger Raiders of the Lost Ark-era Indy would have been handled no problem, but here he's surprisingly weak and clumsy.
5. We're not sure about including another underage, Short Round-style, street kid sidekick.
6. We heard the ending was wild, but it's... really wild. We figured we had an idea what to expect, but we were totally wrong. It's fun to be surprised.
7. The train prologue may go on a little too long, but it's a slam-bang action sequence very much in line with what you'd see in the earlier movies.
8. The last scene got to us. We didn't have to wipe a tear, but we sure came close. You'll know it when you see it.
9. Another great "Indy's getting old" moment comes when he's giving a lecture to a classroom full of bored students, a stark contrast to the students (especially the female students making goo-goo eyes) in the earlier movies who were paying rapt attention.
10. Then again, as a friend pointed out, hitting the "Indy's getting old" angle so hard may be a turnoff for some. Who wants to spend two hours contemplating the looming mortality of one of Hollywood's greatest hero characters?
11. There's also the issue of whether younger moviegoers even know who Indiana Jones is. We took the Little Fries to see it, but would they have gone on their own if given a choice? We've dutifully showed them the first three movies, which they liked, but it's not really in their bones like it is might be for Generation X who came of age with Indiana Jones.
12. They cast Antonio Banderas for that role?
13. It's good that they also gave a strong arc to Phoebe Waller-Bridger's character, who starts the movie undertaking these adventures solely as a way to get rich and get out of debt. Shades of Han Solo, in fact.
14. The "de-aging" CGI magic that creates new flashback footage of Harrison Ford as he looked thirty years ago is pretty good, but it still has a bit of that "uncanny valley" quality at times. That said, you get used to it pretty quickly. It does the trick.
15. It's not an Indiana Jones movie without him riding on a horse, deciphering some crazy clues in an ancient language, or crawling through a booby-trapped underground catacomb. Check, check, and... check.
Updated Indiana Jones movie rankings -
1. Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), obviously
2. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989), obviously
3. Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984), by a hair and if you argued Dial of Destiny is better we wouldn't argue
4. Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023)
and then...
5. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008) - we still can't believe that stupid title
Our (current) favorite Indiana Jones quotes - if you know, you know
* "He chose... poorly."
* "It's not the years, honey. It's the mileage."
* "It belongs in a museum!"
* "Give me the whip!"
* "Nothing to fear here." "That's what scares me."
* "Indiana, let it go."
* "You lost today, kid, but that doesn't mean you have to like it."
* "Bad dates."
* "I don't know, I'm making this up as I go."
* "Snakes. Why did it have to be snakes?"
6.24.2023
Knee-jerk review: "The Flash"
1. There's a really good movie buried away somewhere in here. But you can tell it's been in development for a long time, going through way too many writers and directors. It's got an undercooked, patchwork feel.
2. Michael Keaton is great, of course.
3. The first act baby sequence is clearly meant to be a "wow!" set piece, but just seemed weird to us. Although we love the idea that the Flash needs to consume a ridiculous amount of calories to do what he does.
4. Yes, the Superman Man of Steel movie from 2013 was a huge hit, but it's not exactly a beloved classic outside of inexplicably rabid Zack Snyder fandom. Which means we weren't on board with connecting this movie to the Man of Steel plot. We didn't love sitting through a big superhero fight with General Zod in 2013, so we weren't thrilled to have to now watch another one in 2023.
5. Ezra Miller holds his own. He's got an appropriately quirky nerd vibe that works fine. We weren't distracted by his off-camera legal and health issues.
6. The idea of interacting with another version of yourself is fascinating. The movie has some fun with that notion, especially in the way that loss can totally change your outlook and personality, but it doesn't really go far enough.
7. The humor works. We wanted more.
8. The problem is the ending. What a mess. We suspect this is what's totally killed the movie's word of mouth box office prospects. We can't imagine anyone loving it. It's the usual CGI nonsense, of course, all lasers and energy bolts and "other dimension" monsters, but it was way more confusing to us than most confusing superhero endings. We didn't know what was going on. Watching it was totally exhausting.
9. There's a left-field Nicolas Cage element that is so inside baseball we can't believe the filmmakers included it. They spent 2 to 3 minutes on a gag that 10% of the audience probably got. Misplaced priorities.
10. All that said, there was something unusually dark about the Kobayashi Maru notion that some timelines can't be saved no matter how many different ways you play it. We liked that. Sometimes you can't win.
11. We didn't know the Flash could "phase" through a wall.
12. Sasha Calle's Supergirl is fantastic, a brooding and surly Wolverine-style reluctant hero, but she's utterly wasted. How the movie deals with her and Keaton at the end was extremely frustrating. Almost cast aside like afterthoughts. Why introduce them if they're really not going to add anything?
13. It's really too bad we'll never see Calle as Supergirl again.
14. Once you get past the ridiculous sound-and-fury-signifying-nothing CGI ending, there's a very poignant coda moment with the Flash and his mom. That's the angle the movie probably should have mined more. Sometimes the stakes don't have to involve putting the entire planet in comic book jeopardy.
15. Ben Affleck looked so bored. To us, he'll always be the director of the slam-bang thrilled Argo.
16. Very cool explanation of multiverses and time travel courtesy Bruce Wayne's bowl of pasta.
17. The post-credits tag scene - one that we waited through endless crew names to watch - was a complete letdown, like one final sour cherry on the last 45 minutes of the movie. For some reason we get five minutes of the Flash dragging a drunk Aquaman out of a bar. Aquaman then falls facefirst into a puddle, which we guess was supposed to be funny?
18. As smart and winning as so much of the movie was, some of the filmmakers' choices seemed just so completely wrongheaded.
6.18.2023
Knee-jerk review: "Spider-Man: Across the Spider Verse"
1. Wow.
2. As you may have heard, the movie's visuals - its entire form and style, in fact - are bombastic and energetic in unexpected ways. It's truly art. It takes the look and feel of 2018's Into the Spiderverse and cranks it up to 11.
3. We can't say with authority that it's as groundbreaking as some critics have suggested. One person even suggested it's reinventing cinematic language. That's a bold statement. We suspect there's more anime and gaming (and comic book/graphic novel) influences at work here than our middle-aged brain might comprehend. That is, maybe it's mostly groundbreaking by introducing a niche, fringe visual style to the mainstream moviegoer masses.
4. We're also on the record saying the pedal-to-the-metal vibe that we loved so much here is surely a close cousin to the narrative style of Everything Everywhere All at Once which we... "hate" is a strong word... let's say that movie was very frustrating for us. We didn't get it.
5. Across the Spiderverse is way too long and the plot maybe a little more complicated than it needed to be. But this is minor quibbling.
6. To us, this sort of razzle-dazzle animation - the clash of colors and styles that all somehow fit, the amazing and emotional "performances" by these cartoon characters - is like magic. It's alchemy. How can hundreds of artists collaborate so brilliantly like this?
7. "Canon event." So clever.
8. The big third act twist surprised us and we're rarely surprised. We didn't see it coming, but of course looking back it all made perfect sense. Fantastic.
9. Movie music often blends in the background for us. Which is usually the point. Music is there to seamlessly guide the experience and embellish emotion. But there's no way to miss the score here. In more than one place, the music is awesome, especially in the climax. Like, it's "should we should buy the soundtrack?" good.
10. Jake Johnson is the best.
11. As supervillain super powers go, the Spot may be in the top five. He seems impossible to stop.
12. We will definitely be there for Beyond the Spiderverse in March 2024.
6.17.2023
An Ode to Sound Warehouse
It's a shame Cheese Fry offspring won't ever experience aimless strolls along the aisles of a music store. Those stores - Sound Warehouse, Hit Records on Forest Lane, Musicland (or was it Sam Goody?) in the local malls - played a big part of our coming of age, usually experienced with friends apart from parents. We always felt older and more sophisticated somehow going in those stores. Well into our 20s, in fact, we were still taking frequent spins through the Wherehouse at the Beverly Connection to check out the sales bins or the Virgin Megastore on Sunset that had this amazing innovation of providing samples of tracks from the week's top ten albums by just putting on one of the headphones lined along the back wall.
As we all know, the digitization and iTunes-ification of the music industry slowly but surely drove those stores out of business. There are music sections in stores like Target or Barnes and Noble, sure, but those are sanitized facsimiles of the brash, sprawling, neon stores of the past. Young people now don't even own physical media. Their songs are bits and bytes in a Spotify playlist, a trend we admit that's completely infected us as well. Our background music now mostly comes courtesy of Sirius XM with an embarrassing lean towards 80s and 90s. We can't even remember the last time we bought a CD and that's coming from someone who - much like you, we guess - were once the proud owners of a CD tower packed with the coolest artists only. (Side note: to whoever stole our Toad the Wet Sprocket CD during one of our 1993 apartment parties, a pox on your house. Of all the CDs to choose from, that's the one you picked?)
The Sound Warehouse by Bachman Lake - and later, when we didn't dare run the risk of being seen by friends with our father, the Sound Warehouse out by the late, great Valley View Mall - was to our teenaged brain an oasis of coolness. We couldn't shake a feeling of being an outsider walking through those doors, as if the other customers knew weren't trendy enough to enter their world. It was always exciting, like walking into a real-world version of MTV. The music blasting, playing the latest release by some popular artist - or even better, some obscure artist who hadn't yet "sold out." The grungy employees who seemed so impossibly hip and bored we didn't dare ask a question for fear of a painfully dismissive eye roll. The band posters and flyers covering every wall. But most of all, there were the endless options. Rows and rows of LPs to flip through like alphabetized card catalogs, all of it organized by genre. Rock here, country there, soundtracks back over here. It was organized and yet also somehow sloppy and overwhelming. You didn't have to buy anything. Part of the fun was just looking at the album covers and reading the song lists, debating which item was worth your gas mowing money. It was a whole process. And get this, Zoomers, you could only buy whatever was in stock. (In theory, yes, you could have the store order something for you but we never did that.)
During our early middle school and high school years, our focus was cassette tapes because they played in our bedroom (dual) cassette deck and our 1979 Ford Granada. The music stores of the 1980s had endless shelves full of cassette tapes stacked like gold bars in Fort Knox, all of them in that distinctive crinkly shrink wrap. The less we say about our brief foray into the Columbia Music House record club - ten cassettes for only $1! - the better. And then somewhere along the way we discovered the 45 single. Friends liked to make fun of our fixation with top 40 pop radio hits. So instead of spending $9 for a cassette to get one radio song, why not spend $2 for a little 45 record with just that one song? That there is smart economics. We ultimately ended up with the equivalent of about three shoe boxes worth of 45s and recently converted a good chunk into MP3s. For the record, about 10% were too scratched to transfer and another 10% or so deemed by us to fall into the "what were we thinking?" category and unworthy of preserving. Our collection offered an unexpected cross-section of the rise and fall of 45s: lots and lots of 80s hits and a few early 90s ones through about 1992 or so which coincided with the industry's shift to cassingles. That was actually the name of them. We bought a few of those, sure, but soon the record companies realized they'd make more money making us buy the whole CD.
For the record, our first cassette purchase was a three-fer: The Police's Synchronicity, The Cars' Heartbeat City, and Huey Lewis and the News' Sports. Pretty sure the first CDs we bought alongside the sleek badass CD player we got for Christmas one year were Janet Jackson's Rhythm Nation 1814 and Milli Vanilli's Girl You Know It's True (they were fakes, but those are solid songs, people).
6.04.2023
Knee-jerk review: "Fast X"
1. These movies are completely nuts and illogical. That doesn't mean they're not stupid fun, but each sequence is more ridiculous and impossible than the next.
2. The big joke, of course, is that these small-time street racing thieves are now international spies. This movie opens with some very nonchalant discussion about the team undertaking a mission to Rome to thwart a... something involving computer chips.
3. Jason Momoa steals the movie, no question. It's also interesting that he shades his villain with some rather effeminate flourishes.
4. There's a mournful vibe when it comes to the characters talking about the late Paul Walker's character Brian - but in the movie, he's still alive somewhere safe and sound. Weird.
5. We love that Ludarcis' Tej immediately can identify that a giant steel ball is a neutron bomb.
6. Honestly, if you took out all of the cars and explosions and just looked at the complicated tapestry of these characters and their convoluted, overlapping backstories, you'd have a soap opera. More than once in the movie two characters meet and start immediately fist fighting because of a grudge from two movies ago. Lil Fry had to keep nudging us in the theater with a whispered "Who's she?" The answer was rarely a quick one.
7. The black site prison sequence would probably be too over the top for a Roger Moore-era James Bond movie. It's that wild. Laser robots and knock-out gas.
8. The morose, low-key performance by Sang Kim's Han is weirdly out of place. Does he not know what kind of movie he's in?
9. We'd love a tally of how many times the filmmakers cut to a quick close-up insert shot of either a foot working the clutch and/or gas pedal or a hand shifting gears. They are legion.
10. To us, peak Fast and Furious is Fast Five (2011), a.k.a. the one with the bank vault theft, so it's interesting that this movie is connected to that one.
11. Brie Larson crush.
12. The unending stream of mercenaries and henchman, all with cars and SUVs and helicopters, all swooping in at just the right time to save the hero or rescue the villain to prolong the plot, is impressive. It's one of those movies where you can't really question how these last-minute arrivals were coordinated.
13. We must deduct points for putting the insufferable Pete Davidson in the movie. Did someone in the casting office lose a bet?
14. Love that no matter what happens, the team always has handy those walkie talkies tuned into the right frequency to talk to each other.
15. The many family photos the characters look at so wistfully in the movie are clearly production publicity stills. This is a movie with a nine-figure budget, people.
16. These heavily armored - and presumably well-trained - soldiers and law enforcement agents are never a match for our civilian heroes dressed in street clothes.
17. Despite all our nitpicking and eye-rolling, there's a certain insane charm to these Fast and Furious movies that clearly work so very hard to provide ridiculous spectacles (everything eventually explodes) and to continually underscore the value of family (when Dom makes a speech, drink).
18. It is what it is. We happily paid the admission price.
5.31.2023
The Ghosts in CBS' "Ghosts" Ranked
1. Pete
2. Thorfinn
3. Hetty
4. Isaac
5. Sassapis
6. Trevor
7. Alberta
8. Flower
9. Nigel
5.29.2023
Knee-jerk review: "Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 3"
1. We still cannot wrap our heads around the fact that Bradley Cooper is the voice of Rocket Raccoon. We can't hear anything of Cooper's usual voice in that character.
2. These Guardian movies are chock full of humor (like the lengthy confusion over which button opens which communication channel among the Guardian's spacesuits), so we're very curious to see what writer-director James Gunn does with the DC franchise now that he's in charge and developing a new Superman project. At this point, worn down by the unrelenting grimness of the Chris Nolan Batman movies and Zach Snyder Superman movies, we cannot imagine those characters with any sort of light touch.
3. Pleasant surprises to get both Spacehog's "In the Meantime" and Florence and the Machine's "Dog Days Are Over" on the soundtrack. Great songs.
4. Seems logical that being called a "bad dog" truly is the ultimate canine insult.
5. How the movie resolves the Peter-Gamora relationship (remember that this is the Gamora who has no memory of her romance with Peter because of the events of Avengers: Endgame all the way back in 2019) was a surprise, but completely plausible.
6. It gets pretty dark.
7. All of those recent think pieces about the death of the superhero movie may have been premature given Volume 3's $700 worldwide million gross to date. Then again, this cast of oddball characters are uniquely endearing compared to the usual slam-bang CGI superhero epic.
8. The production design of the deeply weird, half organic Orgocorp headquarters - including the wild costumes of Orgocorp's employees - is fantastic. Critics like to say "you've never seen anything like it" but in this case it's true.
9. "Kill one stupid guy that no one loves."
10. You may have heard there's some unexpected pathos from a subplot involving Rocket-like test animals. Plenty of films with all-human, live-action casts wish they could create that kind of emotion. We're not crying, you're crying.
11. It may not be as good as the first one from 2014 simply because that movie was such an unexpected joy, but it's definitely stronger than Volume 2 in 2017.
5.21.2023
A Few Words About Season Three of Paramount+'s "Picard"
* It's of course 100% fantastic to see the "Next Generation" cast back in action, spouting technobabble, working together, debating big ideas around a conference table.
* But boy do they all look old. Have we gotten that old, too? Yikes. Gray hair and wrinkles galore or, in some cases, startling cosmetic surgery.
* Without question, the best character in this go-round is Worf. Genius.
* The writers always seemed far more interested than us in Data's complicated backstory (ugh, again we have to endure a subplot with Lore), the unending kill-him-no-wait-bring-him-back cycle, and making Brent Spiner play either his creator or one of his creator's relatives. But while it's good to have Data back doing his Data thing, it's little hilarious to see an android with the puffy features of a 60-something.
* Sorry, we know everyone is very invested in helping Jack Crusher and saving him, but we had a hard time caring about his grating, whiny character.
* We won't spoil the show's many twists, but suffice to say that some worked better than others. Indeed, some are quite inspired. In so many ways, the show plays like a "Next Generation" greatest hits package.
* Amanda Plummer will always be Honey Bunny to us.
* We get the need to tell one long serialized story to create high enough stakes to justify getting the band back together, but after we got a delicious taste of one-off, mostly self-contained episodes of "Strange New Worlds" we're definitely getting tired of stories stretched across multiple episodes no matter if it makes story sense or not.
* Big 1990s crush on Michelle Forbes' Ensign Ro.
* Todd Stashwick steals every scene as the Titan's ascerbic Captain Shaw. So it got a little annoying when our "Next Generation" heroes started having big meetings on Shaw's ship with him nowhere in sight. Shouldn't Shaw at least be invited?
* A fellow hardcore Star Trek fan watched all of the seasons during the COVID lockdown and declared that "Deep Space Nine" was the best one. We really should go back and watch it. We gave up midway through the first season way back when. There's a fairly significant "Deep Space Nine" tie-in here.
* Guess they couldn't find a way to fit in Chief O'Brien and Keiko.
* We never liked Lieutenant Shelby. What a tool.
* Weirdly, the climax had some big Return of the Jedi vibes. We're not sure if that's a good thing or not.
* Who wouldn't want to visit the Starfleet Museum?
* "Make it so."
Here are our thoughts from 2020 about the first season of "Picard." We missed season two, but may circle back and take a look. We'll keep you posted.
4.07.2023
Knee-jerk review: "John Wick: Chapter 4"
1. This was the first John Wick movie we paid money to see in a theater. Weird.
2. Keanu Reeves may not have a lot of range as an actor, but he sure knows how to use what he's got.
3. For us, the graphic gun violence (muzzle flashes and blood spray are all CGI'd, by the way) and kinetic wide-angle fights of John Wick (2014) completely revolutionized big-budget action the same way the breathless, gritty hand-to-hand combat of The Bourne Identity did in 2002. A complete sea change.
4. Of course, what elevates the whole John Wick franchise is the insane world-building of this hidden community of global assassins with complicated rules and customs (hotels that serve as safe harbors, tattooed women managing the bounties and hits with chalkboards and typewriters, an assassin governing body called "the High Table"). It gets crazier and crazier with each movie and it's all completely fantastic.
5. That said, if there is a fifth movie, we'd prefer a "reset" that scales everything back and just tells the story of a single assassin paid to do a job, rather than another convoluted Wick-on-the-run thriller.
6. The last hour or so are top-notch, including a nightclub showdown (there's always one) with a character named Killa, a crazy Arc de Triomphe car chase shootout, and some wild action on a big set of concrete steps.
7. But other parts of the movie do lag. In particular, an early fight among stained glass seems to go on forever. It grew very tedious, something we never thought we'd say about a John Wick movie.
8. As cool as the Osaka sequence is - and please note that we're always a sucker for neon-lit city streets in Japan - we found ourselves growing annoyed with Wick, whose decision to show up at a friend's doorstep for help put that friend in danger and ended in needless bloodshed. If Wick just worked things out on his own, the movie is 30 minutes shorter.
9. Big John Woo vibes from the melancholic blind assassin pulled out of retirement for one last job.
10. The cinematography is luminous. Oscar-worthy.
11. Also noteoworthy is the long video-game-style sequence with Wick walking through a building room by room blasting bad guys, all of it shot from above in a single take. It's the sort of thing where you can't believe you're seeing what you're seeing. The filmmakers are working at an incredibly high level.
12. RIP Lance Reddick, who always delivered instant gravitas with his piercing gaze and distinctive voice.
13. It's oh so very hard to convincingly pull off the bit where the hero fights two people at once. There's just no way to plausibly stage it. The two henchmen should attack at the same time, but they never do... they always take turns staggering backward or picking themselves up off the floor, thereby ensuring the hero fights them one at a time.
14. Bill Skarsgaard is an appropriately hateful villain who projects power but is secretly a coward without integrity. The movie is ruthless in putting him in dandy, effeminate suits.
15. John Wick displays superhuman levels of stamina in fighting through waves and waves of NPCs. How he doesn't ever take a moment throw up from the exertion of it all is beyond us.
16. This is the first John Wick movie where it felt to us like Wick was often surviving because - like the stormtroopers in Star Wars - the bad guys have terrible aim.
17. This really could turn into a franchise following multiple characters. This world is that rich and layers.
18. Not a home run perhaps, but a solid triple.
19. Useless aside: we went to school with a guy named John Wick. He wasn't an assassin. He interned at a TV network.
1.16.2023
Knee-jerk review: "M3GAN"
2. The movie is way better than the B-movie vibe suggested by the trailer. There are jump scares, but this is more of a creepy techno-thriller than a traditional horror movie.
4. Seems like the murders have been toned down considerably to get that PG-13 rating. Which certainly accounts for the rowdy teenagers in the theater where we saw it.
5. Filmmakers go out of their way to make sure the victims of Megan's murder spree - at least the first few victims - are more than deserving of their fate so as to extend audience sympathy for the robot doll as long as possible. That's our theory anyway. Even so, what happens to the neighbor seemed particularly cruel.
6. It will come as no shock that the door was left over to a sequel. In fact, we counted two possible avenues for a second Megan (M3GAN) movie.
7. It's perhaps nitpicking, but the movie asks us to believe the primary coder of a successful line of robotic smart toys lives in a modest Seattle suburb. Also that the coder looks like Allison Williams.
8. "Megan, turn off."
9. Some pretty deep themes about death and loss and the dangers of avoiding dealing with personal trauma.
10. Then again, we see someone get their ear ripped off.
11. It's a little bit country, a little bit rock and roll.
13. We have to agree that when it comes to toy collectibles, you don't play with them. That's just common sense.
14. When a psycbo robot doll says "This is the part where you run," you should run.
1.01.2023
Knee-jerk review: "Babylon"
1. La La Land is one of our favorite movies, so we're interested in anything from writer-director Damien Chazelle.
2. This movie... is wild. Some sequences (we count four or five) are brilliant gems of editing and pacing, others are shaggy go-nowhere tangents that probably should have been cut.
3. It's all way, way over the top and excessive. That's not necessarily a criticism. In a movie about the lawless, bacchanal vibe of early Hollywood, it makes sense to be extreme.
4. When the opening scene(!) involves an elephant's sloppy defecation on a minor character, you know you're in for a ride.
5. The most enduring impact of this movie perhaps is our interest in figuring out just how much dramatic license has been taken. How much of this craziness really happened in 1920s Los Angeles? What real-life Hollywood figures are these characters based on?
6. Naturally, it's the brash extrovert who gets the job, not the introverted guy who's actually doing all the work.
7. Brad Pitt is fun to watch, as usual. He's a lot like Harrison Ford to us. Not a lot of range. He's just sort of always does Brad Pitt. But it works.
8. Lot of Big Ideas here about art, especially the way popular entertainment (pop music, television, movies) is looked down upon by the "intellectuals" who prefer higher brow art.
9. There's also universally poignant moments for our characters sadly realizing they've been left behind in a changing world. They naturally mourn for the good old days.
10. For us, it would have been stronger if it ended 15 minutes sooner. There's a needless tag that just goes on and on, hitting the audience over the head to make a point the movie had already made in much more subtle ways. It left a bad taste in our mouth. Quit while you're ahead.
11. Margot Robbie is good, yes. It's a perfect role for her. She excels doing unhinged sexy.
12. But she's playing the most annoying movie character we've seen in a long time, a self-destructive crybaby who isn't content to just crash and burn on her own. She makes awful choices that drag everyone else down with her. We had a hard time with her.
13. The business with Tobey Maquire, the suitcase of cash, and a trip to that underground... whatever it was... a dungeon?... felt like it belonged in a whole other movie. We get the need to dramatize one final scary descent into Hollywood sin, but that was a lot.
14. We've long understood that some silent movie stars couldn't make the transition to talking movies, but we never thought about the technical challenges of having to work out how capture audio. That's the subject of one of the movie's more engaging sequences as the crew tries again and again to get through a single scene.
15. It is indeed a miraculous skill to be able to cry on cue over and over in front of dozens of bored film crew stagehands.
16. We didn't expect to see a rattlesnake.
17. It's definitely memorable.