Author of adventure/thriller and horror fiction

THE BEAR, Season 1

by Leave a Comment

In THE BEAR (FX Original exclusively on Hulu in the U.S., on Disney Plus in Canada), a famous chef takes over his deceased brother’s small Chicago restaurant and all its problems. The result is one of the most affecting series I’ve ever watched.

This is a show about a new chef taking over a restaurant and trying to fix it, only to be resisted at every turn. The staff is resentful and set in its ways, the finances are a disaster, the restaurant owes money to an uncle with shady connections, and everything goes right before it all goes perfectly wrong. It’s also a show about a man trying to fix himself and understand his estranged brother and why he took his own life. In the end, he learns that maybe it’s less important to fix than to find something’s real potential.

Thematically, it’s even more than that if you want it. The joy of food and cooking, the comedy of a light moment, family, work, control, the self worth and pride of a job well done, and change, all wrapped in plenty of raw humanity.

The directing style is terrific, combining a gritty, almost cinema-verite approach with quick cutaways of images reflecting state of mind and big closeups showing urgency and emotion. In the kitchen, the pacing is particularly quick as we see the team that is a restaurant staff work together to prepare meals and react to the new boss trying to change their culture and how they work together.

When the shit hits the fan–and it does a lot in this show from interpersonal conflict to kitchen mishaps (often both at the same time)–the tension is unbelievable. Then there are plenty of moments where everything just sings, from relationships to the restaurant finding its groove. If I had to describe THE BEAR in a few words, I’d call it a story about dysfunctional family told with plenty of heart, though sometimes it feels far more like a heart attack.

Overall, I absolutely loved season 1 of this show, which in many ways felt like BOILING POINT, a great movie, stretched out in a story told with far more depth and humanity. Honestly, I can’t remember the last time I got this tense while laughing this much during almost every single episode of a TV show.

RENFIELD (2023)

by Leave a Comment

RENFIELD (2023) is a terrific movie trapped inside a bad movie. I don’t know how else to put it.

In this film, Renfield (Nicholas Hoult) has been serving Dracula (Nicholas Cage) for over a century. Exhausted by constantly finding victims and fleeing vampire hunters, he brings his master to America and starts to question their relationship after a chance walk-in with a support group for emotionally dependent personalities. He gains the seed of independence and self worth and hopes to act on it, but rejecting the evil, narcissistic, and vengeful prince of darkness will be no easy thing.

What an amazing setup for a movie, truly killer high concept and fertile ground for an excellent, deep, and dark comedy. Unfortunately, it’s not explored to its full potential. Instead, we get a major plot line involving an organized crime family and a cop seeking justice for her murdered father. This rote storyline helps catalyze Renfield’s journey but dominates the film, hoping to please fans with a lot of CGI action and Monty Python levels of gore but ultimately just eating up the run time. The result is a movie with two personalities, and the dominant one is the paint-by-numbers crowd pleaser.

Nicholas Hoult and Nicholas Cage are terrific actors and always great to look at. Cage in particular transcends even his usual Cageyness to bring something zany and new but also familiar to a role that has been played many times before. Their characters’ conflict is the real gem even if it’s largely obscured by the mob/cop plot, ironically showing us a different kind of codependent relationship between telling a good story and satisfying expectations, a case study for Hollywood’s tendency to avoid complexity to please the most amount of people.

All that said, RENFIELD ain’t a bad movie. Just the opposite, I quite liked it for its better qualities. I just wished it had been lovable, as it so easily could have achieved with its terrific premise.

PETERLOO (2018)

by Leave a Comment

Directed by Mike Leigh, PETERLOO (2018) is a British historical drama about the Peterloo Massacre of 1819 in Manchester, England, currently streaming on Amazon Prime. At nearly 2.5 hours in runtime, the film is powerful if bloated and challenging, particularly with its dense political speeches. Still, the history warranted this approach in my view. From the beautiful cinematography and detailed sets to the historical accuracy and importance of the subject matter, this was a terrific watch for me.

The film’s story plays out in two layers. The first is an average family of British laborers living in Manchester in England’s industrial north, struggling to get by in the economic slump following the Napoleonic Wars. The second is the machinations of radicals hoping to achieve parliamentary reform to give Manchester and the working class greater representation in government, and the utterly corrupt government officials fearing the kind of revolutionary fervor that overthrew the monarchy in France. These storylines come together in a mass rally where the famed radical orator Henry Hunt would give a speech to a crowd of 60,000 people, and the government’s horrific reaction.

The storylines work well together. The leaders of the radical movement clearly spell out the horrible conditions of the working class, greed of the capitalist factory owners, utter corruption of the government, and Britain’s democracy entirely tilted toward government by and for land owners. The family shows us what all this means on a daily basis. Meanwhile, we see the heavy-handedness of the government reaction behind the scenes, with brutal police tactics against dissent that are used to this day, and their willingness to use force to preserve the status quo.

The politics are important but laid on thick, as we see multiple speeches by various radical leaders and a whole lot of interactions between the radical leaders and government officials. Still, I imagine to many viewers this will start to feel like a slog after a while. Personally, I enjoyed the depth and open sentiments, clearly spelling out what was at stake for the average laborer. For our modern times, it provides a nice reminder that while social justice is important, a just economy is just as vital.

Check it out if you’re interested in a deep, fiery historical drama about a little known but very important event in British history, supported by a terrific cast including Rory Kinnear and Karl Johnson.

THEY CLONED TYRONE (2023)

by Leave a Comment

THEY CLONED TYRONE (2023) is a surprising movie. It plays like a 70s Blaxploitation film with a clever sci-fi element reminiscent of THE CABIN IN THE WOODS. I didn’t love this one, but I liked it a lot, and damn, like I said, it’s surprising in how it mashes so many elements together to create something I’d never seen it before. For that alone, it got my respect.

The movie starts with Fontaine (John Boyega), a drug dealer in a depressed Black community haunted by the death of his younger brother. He gets mixed up with pimp Slick Charles (Jaimie Foxx) and sex worker Yo-Yo (the stellar Teyonah Parris) when a strange and impossible event sets them on a course to uncover a bizarre conspiracy. To save their community, they’ll need to figure out the system opposing them and use brains and muscle to defeat it.

Otherwise, I don’t want to say too much, as this is one of those movies that’s best discovered knowing as little as possible. At first, we’re given what seems to be a Blaxploitation film, shot to look as 70s and gritty as possible, with Black stereotypes that are frankly uncomfortable and also uncomfortably familiar from historical depiction in film. As the sci-fi element becomes exposed, the movie veers off into some weird territory.

The allusions to the forces that keep poverty-stricken people in poverty are obvious, treading into satire territory and leading to comparisons with films like SORRY TO BOTHER YOU (a movie about capitalism that I love, love, love). Still, though the payoff didn’t quite hold together for me–the explanation exactly why all the bad stuff in the story was happening. Nonetheless, with its distinct style by director Juel Teng, terrific performances, mashup of numerous Blaxploitation and sci-fi media, and overall punch, THEY CLONED TYRONE is a nice, provocative surprise, and definitely something to check out if you’re sick of the usual fare.

BARBIE (2023)

by Leave a Comment

In BARBIE (2023), mixed, heavy-handed messaging turns an otherwise vibrant production tedious, but it feels good for its intended market, with which the core messaging appears to be resonating. That’s wonderful, but aside from some bright moments, the movie wasn’t for me.

In this story, Barbie lives in her Barbie Dream House in Barbie Land, where the Barbies followed the evolution of the toy with great diversity among the Barbies and empowering professions. Everything is perfect, except one Barbie (Margot Robbie) is having troubling thoughts. For her, reality appears to be intruding. The only solution, she learns, is to go to the real world. Along the way, she learns about the wonders and challenges of a complicated real existence as a woman.

This comedy is certainly fun though not very funny, at least for me. Margot Robbie, an excellent actor, shines as Barbie. Ryan Gossling steals the show as Ken, especially during his dance number lamenting Ken’s #2 status in Barbie world, possibly the brightest point in the movie. The actor looks like he’s having the time of his life in the role.

There’s a lot of feminist messaging here, a great deal of which I already agreed with, though it’s laid on so thick and without wit that it comes across as smug and tedious, though again I’m not really the target market. The core message is that women face unique difficulties in a society in which a lot of progress has been made but in which there are still strong institutional hurdles against them succeeding. This comes to life in the film as the perfect life of Barbie, which morphed into an empowering image of womanhood over the years, is contrasted against real society and the challenges women face. Again, that’s a solid theme and relevant, but I don’t tend to enjoy being hit over the head with a theme but prefer to discover it on my own as a thinking adult.

Besides that, the messaging for me got muddied at the end. (Spoilers ahead.) Forget Mattel’s influence on and portrayal in the movie, which is itself problematic for a whole slew of reasons. Forget the abundance of low-hanging fruit of negative male stereotypes, where we’re told all men do this or that crappy thing. Where things got really muddy was the portrayal of the Kens, led of course by Ken (Ryan Gossling). Seeing the men in his world reduced to second class citizens with literally zero agency, jobs, power, or even a purpose other than to worship Barbie, he naively imports “patriarchy” to Barbie Land, resulting in a male-dominated revolution. What he really wants is basic respect, some agency, and a voice. This is great stuff. But instead of getting anything, instead of both Kens and Barbies learning anything, the Kens are smugly manipulated back into being subservient, and we find out Ken’s problem all along is he’s basically an incel. So, patriarchy bad, but matriarchy good? I thought the goal was equality?

Overall, it is what it is, making BARBIE fairly YMMV. I basically enjoyed it despite frequently finding it overwrought and tedious between the good bits, though I think THE POWER, the series based on Naomi Alderman’s fantastic novel THE POWER, handles these themes in a far more interesting way. Check it out yourself and make up your own mind if you’d like to see what all the fuss is about.

HELLBENDER (2021)

by Leave a Comment

In HELLBENDER (2021, Shudder), a mother and daughter live in peaceful isolation in the woods, but they harbor a dark secret. Shot on the fly during the pandemic and indie to the hilt, the film nonetheless holds together as a solid story about witchcraft and matriarchy. I liked this one a lot.

In the forest outside a small town, teen Izzy lives with her mom. They appear happy together, playing music together in a band they named Hellbender. But something isn’t right. They eat only what they find on the forest floor. Told she has a severe illness, Izzy isn’t allowed to leave the property. Mom appears to have strange powers. A chance meeting leads Izzy to understand who and what she is, the supreme power available to her and how to tap its reservoir, and how the cycle of life must continue.

The movie is extraordinary in it was produced by family and bandmates Toby Poser, John Adams, and their kids Lulu and Zelda Adams during the pandemic. The frequent improvisation, leaning into the band playing, and low production quality sometimes puts it a little off kilter, but overall this movie worked for me. I found the approach to witchcraft to be engaging, believable, and filled with terrific lore. I loved the natural confrontation it set up. Overall, the lore feels deep, as if what we’re shown is only a glimpse of so much more.

Overall, HELLBENDER was one of those delightful surprises you find by taking a chance on something new that’s a little raw and slow but compelling. Recommended for folk horror fans looking for something a little different.