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.

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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.

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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).

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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.

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