Unfrosted (2024) **1/2

 

Jerry Seinfeld is an interesting fellow. For his directorial film debut, the comedian probably could have done anything he wanted. What he chose to do was tell a mildly humorous version of the 1960's battle between cereal giants Kellogg and Post as they raced to develop a toaster pastry. The result of that battle was Pop-tarts, “the greatest pair of rectangles since the 10 Commandments.”

The story is based loosely on the very real rivalry between Kellogg and Post. The companies have always stolen each other's ideas. As a character says in the movie, “We're like Ford and Chevy. We sell the exact same thing; the difference is marketing.” Post really did start out ahead in the pastry race, but timing and marketing are everything, and their Country Squares proved no match for Pop-tarts.

When a guy of Seinfeld's comedic stature calls, people in Hollywood are going to answer, and sure enough, a ridiculously high-octane cast of A-list personae showed up for this farce. The list includes Melissa McCarthy, Hugh Grant, Amy Schumer, Jon Hamm, Peter Dinklage, and way too many B+-listers and character actors to name here. You will spend the whole movie saying, “Hey, that's so-and-so!”

And you will watch the movie, assuming you have Netflix and are of an age to know who Jerry Seinfeld is. There is simply no reason not to watch this silly celebration of breakfast food. There is also no reason to pretend that it is anything more than an amusing vanity project. In the 90's, “Seinfeld” pushed boundaries with episodes like the “master of my domain” one and the one with the wooden Indian. He took risks and ruffled feathers. “Unfrosted” does neither. The movie is one big Dad-joke. It has laughs, but they are gentle, family friendly, even. Like the breakfast pastry that the film celebrates, it is a bunch of empty calories that you will forget about soon after consuming it. (Not that there's anything wrong with that!)

2.5 stars out of 5

No Hard Feelings ***

 

It has been obvious that Jennifer Lawrence is an amazing actress since 2010's "Winter's Bone." The 20-yr-old displayed a range and level of maturity beyond her years in that film, and she has confirmed her genius in follow-ups like "Silver Linings Playbook," "American Hustle," and the "Hunger Games" films. It should come as no surprise, then, that she is able to take a silly, forgettable comedy like “No Hard Feelings” and elevate it above its genre.

Lawrence plays Maddie, an irresponsible, hot mess with limited career prospects who has burned through all the available men in her small town. She responds to an ad from a couple of concerned parents looking for someone to “date” their shy, virginal, adult son. Maddie promises to “date the shit” out of the young man in exchange for a car.

You can pretty much guess the rest of the story. There have been a million of these “nerdy guy dates hot girl” movies. “No Hard Feelings” doesn't really distinguish itself from the other offerings in this genre, but it does manage to be entertaining, largely on the charms of Jennifer Lawrence. She has good comic timing, and with the help of a supporting cast that is at least competent, she turns a hackneyed story into a fun bit of comedy.

3 stars out of 5

The Holdovers (2023) ***

 

From director Alexander Payne and star Paul Giamatti, the team that brought us the brilliant “Sideways,” we now have “The Holdovers,” a thoughtful, funny, sometimes overly-sweet film about a bunch of misfits forming an unlikely family.

Giamatti plays Paul Hunham, a grumpy, cross-eyed antiquities teacher at the toney Barton academy, a New England boarding school for boys. Unpopular with the students, faculty, and administration, Hunham gets stuck with the job of staying at school over the holidays to look after the handful of boys who have nowhere to go over the Christmas break, the “holdovers.” You might think that Hunham wouldn't mind the job that much. He lives on campus, and with no family, he has no travel plans. In fact, Hunham has never really gone anywhere. He went from being a student at Barton (on scholarship) to teaching there, and he seems destined to live out his lonely life being grumpy there.

Hunham sees a bit of himself in one of the boys. Angus (Dominic Sessa) is bright but socially awkward. He is also unpopular at Barton, and his status as a holiday holdover is extra painful because he was dropped at the last minute from his family's beach vacation. The other holdover boys are a mixed bag of various ages and backgrounds. With frigid weather outside, and an unsympathetic Mr. Hunham inside, the boys prepare to spend an unhappy holiday.

Director Alexander Payne is known for his clever, often darkly funny, character studies, including “Citizen Ruth”, “Election”, and “Sideways”. “The Holdovers” is interesting not because exciting things happen, but because of the glimpse it gives you of characters you might not normally pay attention to: the grumpy teacher, the awkward student, and the quiet cook who lost her son to Vietnam (Da'Vine Joy Randolph).

There are people of a certain age for whom “Dead Poets Society” was their favorite movie growing up. Now that they are adults, “The Holdovers” should be their new favorite. Like “Dead Poets”, “The Holdovers” is about a teacher whose integrity gets him into trouble, but who winds up inspiring at least one of his students. “The Holdovers” does not get as melodramatically dark as “Dead Poets”, but its tone throughout is more melancholy, its characters more complex, and its hero harder to warm up to. Like “Dead Poets”, “The Holdovers” crosses the line from emotional to treacly at times.

The film is worth seeing for the excellent performances by Paul Giamatti and young co-star Dominic Sessa, and for the Oscar-winning supporting performance by Da'Vine Joy Randolph. Still, Alexander Payne and Paul Giamatti have done better. If you saw”Sideways,” you know that wine-themed movie was like a fine pinot noir - subtle, complex, something you want to revisit again and again. “The Holdovers” is more like a merlot - pleasant but basic.

3 stars out of 5

Burn After Reading (2008) ***

 

Like every spy story, “Burn After Reading” is convoluted. CIA analyst Osborne Cox (John Malkovich) loses his job and decides to write his memoirs. His shrew of a wife, Katie (Tilda Swinton) accidentally copies his manuscript along with their financial information while secretly preparing to file for divorce. A copy of her files gets left in a gym locker room, where a couple of dim-witted gym employees, Linda (Frances McDormand) and Chad (Brad Pitt) mistake it for actual intelligence data. Linda and Chad figure this stuff must be worth money to someone, and they proceed to try to cash in on their find. Meanwhile, Linda starts dating a married cad named Harry, (George Clooney), who also happens to be Katie's secret lover.

Each character in this black comedy is dumber than the last, and this confederacy of dunces circulate around each other, spinning towards a conclusion that, in Coen brothers tradition, is funny and violent. The thing is, “Burn After Reading” was just a little disappointing. For a Coen brothers movie, it just does not have a lot to it. It's funny, but not nearly as funny as “Fargo” or “The Big Lebowski.” It's a convoluted tale of lies and deceit, but coming from the guys who wrote “Miller's Crossing,” the twists and turns in this story feel pedestrian. The movie is reasonably entertaining and funny, but in the end, this is a massively-talented, A-list cast paired with a legendary writing/ directing duo for a story that just does not amount to much. It's like I ordered a big, juicy, Coen brothers cheeseburger and got served a vegan burger without a bun.

3 stars out of 5

Killer Joe (2011) ***1/2

 

I like a good neo-noir as much as the next guy. And I don't mind them being trashy. John McNaughton's lurid 1998 film “Wild Things” is one of my favorites. It turns out, though, that I have my limits when it comes to trashiness, and as good as it is, the southern gothic “Killer Joe” pushes those limits.

Adele Smith is a thorn in the side of her family. Her kids, Chris (Emile Hirsch) and Dottie (Juno Temple), and her ex-husband, Ansel (Thomas Hayden Church), can't stand her. Her latest transgression is stealing cocaine that Chris was supposed to sell, putting him in serious debt to his supplier. It's the last straw. Chris visits his dad with a plan. He has heard about a dirty cop named Joe Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) who does murder-for-hire. Chris convinces Ansel that they can have Adele killed and have Dottie collect as the beneficiary on her insurance policy. That should give them more than enough to pay Joe's fee and split a nice profit amongst the family.

It's a straitforward plan, except that Joe doesn't take jobs on spec. Dealing with the kind of people he does, it makes sense that he would be more of a cash-up-front operator. Joe takes a shine, however, to Dottie, and agrees to do the job in exchange for her favors. Dottie actually likes Joe, and soon he's like a member of the family, hanging around the trailer, spending nights with Dottie, and preparing to murder Adele. The family's various white-trash entanglements and general stupidity, however, get in the way of a smoothly-running plan.

This is actually a tightly-crafted tale of murder and deception, neo-noir at its best. The Smith clan are a sordid enough bunch that, other than Dottie, it should be hard to feel sorry for any of them. Solid acting on the parts of Hirsh and Church, however, make it possible to feel symathetic towards even these low-lifes. Joe, however, is really creepy. McConaughey plays Joe as a cool, collected killer, but his wooing of the intellectually disabled Dottie has an ick factor that is off the charts. Between Joe's weird, domineering seduction style and the gratuitous violence in the film, this is not something to watch on a full stomach.

At the end of the day, “Killer Joe” is a perfectly-paced black-comedy thriller. It's too lurid by half, but a great narrative and great acting make it required viewing for the neo-noir fan who can stomach it.

3.5 stars out of 5

The Ghost and The Darkness (1996) **

Memory plays tricks on you, some big, and some small. In this case, I could have sworn that the name of this movie was “The Ghost IN the Darkness.” It makes sense. But the title is “The Ghost AND The Darkness,” because the African and Indian workers who were terrorized by a pair of man-eating lions in this tale named one of the lions The Ghost and one of them The Darkness.

The story is set in Kenya, in 1898. British Lt. Col John Henry Patterson (Val Kilmer) is an engineer sent to build a railroad bridge over the Tsavo River. Under his capable command, things go swimmingly until a pair of man-eating lions start killing off his workers. Construction grinds to a halt, and all of Patterson's energies become consumed by trying to kill the lions. The beasts really come to seem evil spirits, as they repeatedly evade Patterson's traps and feed on his workers. Even a famous American hunter (Michael Douglas) is stymied by the lions.

The true story is fascinating, but the movie is a hot mess. Val Kilmer was in the middle of a divorce and fresh off the legendary disaster that was “The Island of Dr. Moreau.” He just looks exhausted, and while that sometimes fits his character, it mostly just leaves us with bad acting of a bad script. Michael Douglas does the best he can with the cringey lines he has to recite, but there is only so much you can do with a horrible script. Screenwriter William Goldman is known for wonderful films like “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” and “The Princess Bride,” but with “The Ghost and The Darkness,” he takes an amazing true story and mangles it. Even director Stephen Hopkins admitted the film “was a mess... I haven't been able to watch it.”

The historical true story of John Henry Patterson and the lions is one outrageous tale. Those two cats really did manage to stymie the efforts of the British Empire for a brief period. The number of men they killed is unknown. Patterson, in his book “The Man-Eaters of Tsavo,” claims the number was 135. The railroad company only verified 28 deaths. Either way, the terror they created was undeniable, and it remains one of the most notorious examples of man-eating behavior in wild animals. Patterson killed both lions himself, without the help of any fictitious American hunter (sorry, Michael Douglas), and their stuffed remains are on display at Chicago's Field Museum of Natural History. It remains a mystery why these two cats developed such a taste for human flesh. Almost as big a mystery is how a legendary screenwriter and a couple of talented actors turned this amazing true story into such a mess.

2 stars out of 5

Tammy and the T-Rex (1994) ***

 

Before "The Velocipastor," there was “Tammy and the T-Rex,” a goofy, bizarre, and delightful dinosaur-themed movie about teenage love and weird science. A baby-faced Paul Walker (7 years before “The Fast and the Furious”) plays Michael, a high-school football star. A run-in with some hoodlums and a mad scientist leads to Michael's brain being installed in an animatronic T-Rex, and it is up to his girlfriend Tammy (Denise Richards) to save him.

This is a pure cult classic. The story goes that Director Stewart Raffill was approached by a theme park owner who had gotten his hands on an animatronic dinosaur. The T-Rex was scheduled to be shipped to Texas in 2 weeks, and the guy suggested they try to make a movie with it first. In record time, Raffill wrote a script around the beast and filmed a low-budget movie.

Is it good? Well, that depends on your expectations. It's really dumb, but I found it silly, funny, and an unmitigated good time. You may recognize Terry Kiser from “Weekend at Bernie's” as the mad scientist, and he actually classes the film up a bit, as does J. Jay Saunders as the black sheriff, named Sheriff Black. Denise Richards can't act her way out of a wet paper sack, but she sure looks good. Paul Walker is not much of a thespian, either, although he doesn't actually get a lot of screen time. That animatronic dinosaur is amazing, though! It really has a lot of movement and expressions, and may be the best actor in the film.

This is not a must-see like, say “UHF” or “The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8^th Dimension” or even “The Velocipastor,” but if you dig a goofy cult classic, you can put this one on your list.

3 stars out of 5

Oldboy (2003) ****

 

At the juncture of Greek tragedy and “The Count of Monte Cristo” sits “Oldboy”, a classic of Korean cinema. I've been hearing about the film for years, but I was put off by reading that it is the second film in a trilogy by writer/director Park Chan-wook (who also did "The Handmaiden"). I figured I had to watch the first movie before seeing “Oldboy”. That turns out not to be a concern at all. Chan-wook's “Revenge Trilogy” is a trilogy only in the loosest sense of the word, with the films (“Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance”, “Oldboy”, and “Lady Vengeance”) linked only by the theme of revenge. “Oldboy” stands just fine on its own. With that out of the way, I finally got a chance to watch it on Netflix, and it turns out to be much more convoluted and just plain weird than the revenge flick I was expecting.

Oh Dae-su is an ordinary businessman, maybe a bit of a cad and a drunk, who finds himself kidnapped and imprisoned with no explanation. For 15 years he is kept in a solitary room with no explanation of why and no human contact. When he finally gets out, he seeks his revenge. This is the bare outline, and I don't want to give much more plot than that and ruin any of the surprises.

The violence is plentiful in “Oldboy”, but this is much more than a kung-fu movie. Oh Dae-su has to solve the mystery of who imprisoned him and why, and the mystery turns out to be much more twisted than you would expect. There's a love story in there as well. And did I mention the kung-fu? Oh Dae-su spends his years of confinement training, and he kicks some serious ass once he hits the streets. The cinematography is amazing, and the film is especially known for a fighting scene in a corridor that is done in one, long shot. Be warned, though, this is not all lighthearted chopsocky action. There are some very disturbing scenes of torture and mutilation, and the plot takes some really perverse twists.

The story can also be hard to follow at times. As a non-Asian viewer, I sometimes struggled to tell who was who, especially as the story jumps back and forth through the years. It doesn't help that Oh Dae-su's enemy, who is supposed to be his age, is played by a much younger actor. That was an odd casting choice.

“Oldboy” is not for everyone, and I don't think I would re-watch it anytime soon. Once is enough! Even with its flaws, though, I would consider this required viewing for real cinephiles. The writing, cinematography, and mix of violence and humor conspire to make this a genre classic.

4 stars out of 5

Horrible Bosses 2 (2014) ***

 

I resisted watching this sequel when it came out, because, really? “Horrible Bosses” was a delightfully funny movie, but it did not seem to demand a sequel. I figured “Horrible Bosses 2” was a blatant cash grab that was bound to suck. It turns out I was both right and wrong. This sequel is totally gratuitous, but it is more fun than a barrel full of monkeys!

Nick (Jason Bateman), Kurt (Jason Sudeikis), and Dale (Charlie Day), the would-be criminals who tried to kill their horrible bosses in the first film, are trying to become bosses themselves. With an invention called the Shower Buddy, the trio go into business with investors Bert and Rex Hanson (Christoph Waltz and Chris Pine). This father/son duo wind up screwing the boys over, and to get revenge, they decide to leap back into the world of crime by kidnapping Rex for ransom.

Objectively, “Horrible Bosses 2” is not a good movie. It doesn't even have an interesting title. It was a pretty typical studio cash-grab, shamelessly meant to capitalize on the success of the first movie. “Horrible Bosses” director Seth Gordon did not wind up returning for the sequel. He was replaced by Sean Anders, who has a couple of reasonably-respectable writing credits (“We're the Millers” and “Hot Tub Time Machine”), but whose directing filmography includes features like “Daddy's Home” and “Daddy's Home 2”. The original screenwriters were also replaced by Anders and his writing partner John Morris.

The thing is, none of that seems to matter. The first movie was a machine-gun barrage of hit-or-miss jokes. Unbound by any requirements of taste or logic, it was free to just be funny, and it was dumb but highly-entertaining. It's the same with the sequel. I wasn't proud to be laughing out loud at these nitwits, but there I was. It helps that they got the whole gang back together, including Jennifer Aniston, Kevin Spacey, and Jamie Foxx, and Chris Pine is a great new addition. Many critics wrote this off as a massive waste of an A-list cast, but for my money it's an example of a skimpily-written film succeeding on the charms of a talented ensemble.

There is no “Horrible Bosses 3”, and thank goodness. It's hard to imagine this franchise holding up for a third outing. It was hard to imagine it holding up for this sequel, but in its own, sophomoric way, it does. If you want a story with heart and intelligent humor, this is not it. If you just want to giggle yourself silly, “Horrible Bosses 2” may be your jam.

3 stars out of 5

Waterworld (1995) ***

 

There's a collection of movies out there that are known for being bad. This is strange, when you think about it, because, really, there are a LOT of bad movies. Most of them are bad. Most of those simply fade away into obscurity, while a handful are “so bad they are good” and achieve cult status. Another handful get written into history as famously bad films, and 1995's”Waterworld” is one of those.

On a future Earth covered in water due to global warming, Kevin Costner plays a loner, the Mariner, wandering the endless ocean on his sailboat, growing limes in a potted tree, recycling his own urine, and eking out an existence on a planet that is no longer designed for humans. There are other lone wolves out there, and then there are people banded together pathetically on small, floating islands. There are also pirates called Smokers, led by the sadistic Deacon (Dennis Hopper), who have access to gasoline and zip around on motorboats and jet skis, preying on the weak.

The one dream shared by all of these miserable humans is the dream of dry land. The story converges around a young girl (Tina Majorino) whose tattoo may be the key to finding dry land in the vast ocean. Everyone wants the girl, including the Smokers, and the Mariner gets roped into helping her and her adopted mom (Jeanne Tripplehorn).

There is nothing wrong with the story setup or the cast. “Waterworld”'s problems largely center on execution. Costner has been accused of wooden acting, but in fairness, he is playing the Mariner as a loner, isolated from other humans. His reticence makes sense, but it does keep us at arms length from our hero. No one else in the cast is given enough to do to let us live the story through them, so it winds up being hard to get really invested in the story. The film also feels oddly claustrophobic, given that it takes place on an open ocean that covers the entire globe. It's weird that with all that open water, these characters keep running into each other. It's also a LONG movie at 2 hours 15 minutes, and even with all the swashbuckling, it feels long.

Still, “Waterworld” is not without charm. Dennis Hopper chews scenery delightfully as the main villain, and there's plenty of action. This is reasonably-diverting entertainment, better than a lot of action movies. I agree with reviewers who have said that the film deserves to be reassessed. It is not so much legendarily bad, as it was disappointing in its time. “Waterworld”'s bad reputation stems from a combination of a massive budget along with the attendant hype that created expectations that this film simply could not meet.

3 stars out of 5