Author Archives: Jedadiah Leland

Timothee Chalamet Plays A Mean Ping Pong In The Trailer For Marty Supreme

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Timothee Chalamet plays Marty Mauser, a young man who dreams of being the world’s greatest ping pong player.

Normally, that is not the type of plot description that would catch my attention but Marty Supreme is directed by Josh Safdie, so you know it’s going to be about much more than just ping pong.  The cast is also intriguing.  Along with Chalamet, the cast includes everyone from Gwyneth Paltrow to Fran Drescher to Penn Jillette and director Abel Ferrara.  Is Kevin O’Leary playing himself?  Who knows with Safdie directing?

Judging from the trailer, this might be the most intense ping pong film ever made.

Liam Neeson Battles Zombies In The Trailer For Cold Storage

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

It’s comforting to know that every year is going to bring us a new Liam Neeson action film.  He’s already got his film for 2026 in the can and ready to go.  Judging by the trailer, Cold Storage finds Neeson battling zombies and leaning into the comedic skills that he’s currently displaying in The Naked Gun.

 

Music Video of the Day: The Memory Remains by Metallica, featuring Marianne Faithfull (1997, directed by Paul Andresen)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

There are many reasons why Jason Newsted is one of the greatest bassists of all time.  Beyond his talent, there’s his honesty.  Newsted is someone who is going to shoot straight, no matter what the question may be.  For instance, in 2002, Newsted was asked if, as a heavy metal fan, he would have bought Metallica’s 1997 album, Reload.

Newsted, who had left Metallica the previous year, replied, “Not if I heard ‘The Memory Remains‘ first.”

The Memory Remains might not be Metallica’s song.  Newsted was definitely right about that.  But it does have a memorable video, one that shows that, once the band broke their previous “no videos” stance, they quickly figured out how to use the format to their advantage.

This video was shot at the Van Nuys Airport and it had a budget of $400,000.  The room that they are performing in was actually a constructed box.  The room moved while the band remained stationary on a platform, which created the impression of the band playing while on a giant swing.  Marianne Faithfull adds her vocals as well.

Enjoy!

 

Retro Television Review: Homicide: Life On The Street 4.1 “Fire: Part One”

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Welcome to Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past!  On Sundays, Lisa will be reviewing Homicide: Life On The Street, which aired from 1993 to 1999, on NBC!  It  can be viewed on Peacock.

Episode 4.1 “Fire: Part One”

(Directed by Don Scardino, originally aired on October 20th, 1995)

Hey, guest reviewer here!  It’s my pleasure to review the fourth season premiere of Homicide.  As someone who lived in Baltimore while the show was airing, I watched every episode of Homicide (and later, The Wire).  It was always interesting to see Frank Pembleton and Tim Bayliss and John Munch and Kay Howard walking down streets that I recognized.  It didn’t matter that the show presented Baltimore as being a hotbed of murder and corruption, mostly because anyone who has lived in Baltimore knows that our city is often just that.  There are wonderful places and people in Baltimore.  There’s also a a lot of problems.

Enough editorializing from me!  Let’s talk about the fourth season premiere.  It opens with Kay and Munch talking about how Detectives Beau Felton and Stanley Bolander have been suspended without pay for 22 weeks because of some drunken shenanigans at a cop convention.  That was the way that the show wrote out former series regulars Daniel Baldwin and Ned Beatty.  (Baldwin was dropped due to his drug addiction.  Beatty wanted to get back to movies.)  Felton?  Sure, I could imagine him doing something stupid at a convention.  But the idea that conservative, straight-laced Bolander would join him in that behavior?  That’s never sat well with me.  That was out of character for Stanley Bolander.

Gee’s unit is now down by three detectives.  He needs replacements but Megan Russert — Tim’s cousin, we’re told! — says that they can’t afford to hire any new detectives.  Maybe Gee should reach out to another division and see if anyone wants to transfer.  Gee looks at the Board, which is covered in red ink.  His remaining detectives are struggling to close cases and nobody wants to partner up with Lewis.

Pembleton and Bayliss, the best Homicide team out there, are investigating a warehouse fire.  An unidentified body has been found in the warehouse, burned to a crisp.  They meet Detective Mike Kellerman (Reed Diamond), the cocky and youngish arson investigator who is convinced that the fire was set by a bigshot businessman named Matthew Rowland.  Kellerman gets on Pembleton’s nerves but he bonds with Bayliss.  Even though it hasn’t happened by the end of this episode, it’s obvious that Kellerman  is going to end up at Homicide.  And because everyone in this episode keeps talking about how they refuse to partner up with Lewis, you can guess who Kellerman is going to end up working with.

Mike Kellerman went on to become one of the best characters on the show.  Everyone remembers the Luther Mahoney story arc.  Reed Diamond eventually became a key member of the ensemble.  But I can remember the controversy that initially greeted his character.  A lot of viewers and critics resented that he was replacing the popular Ned Beatty.  (No one really cared about Daniel Baldwin.)  Reed Diamond was seen as a pretty boy actor who was intruding on a gritty crime drama.  As an introduction, this episode doesn’t do Kellerman many favors.  He comes on very strong and, within minutes, he’s antagonizing and double guessing Pembleton.  A scene where Megan confronts him about going after Matthew Rowland makes it seem like the show is trying too hard to be a typical cop drama.  It reminded me of when Itchy & Scratchy added Poochie and Poochie was just too in your face with his coolness.  Luckily, Reed Diamond was a better actor than Homer Simpson and Mike Kellerman did not die on the way back to his home planet.  Instead, after this shaky introduction, he became a key member of one of the best casts in the history of television.

This episode ends on a cliffhanger, with another fire being set at another warehouse.  Kellerman’s going to be around for a while, whether Frank Pembleton likes it or not.

Retro Television Review: The American Short Story #10 “The Golden Honeymoon”

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Welcome to Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past!  On Saturdays, Lisa will be reviewing The American Short Story, which ran semi-regularly on PBS in 1974 to 1981.  The entire show can be purchased on Prime and found on YouTube and Tubi.

Episode #10: The Golden Honeymoon (1980, directed by Noel Black)

Hey, guest reviewer here!  Don’t worry, Lisa will return next week.  Next week’s episode has got Eric Roberts in it and she told me there’s no way she’s going to miss that!

This episode is an adaptation of a short story by the author Ring Lardner, who was a member of the Algonquin Round Table and whose son won an Oscar for writing the script for the movie version of M*A*S*H.  The Golden Honeymoon about an old couple (James Whitmore and Teresa Wright) who celebrate their 50th anniversary by going on a “golden honeymoon” to Florida.  While there, they meet the wife’s old flame (Larry Loonin) and Whitmore feels like he has to win his Wright all over again.  Whitmore and Loonin play a lot of different games, like shuffleboard and checkers.  You know you don’t want to get between a group of elderly people playing checkers!  Wright gets frustrated with Whitmore but they make up by the end of the episode.  They bicker but they love each other.

I have not read the original short story on which this episode is based.  Ring Lardner was famous for his wit and he probably could have found a lot of comedic moments in two old romantic rivals having an intense checkers game.  The episode itself reminded me of those films that my high school English teachers would always show in class.  “You are going to love this,” the teacher always says and then the members of the class sit there in stony silence as they watched the slowest, most visually static program imaginable.  This episode was not just boring.  It was PBS boring.

I don’t want to be to negative, though.  I like both James Whitmore and Teresa Wright.  Whitmore was the elderly prisoner in The Shawshank Redemption.  Teresea Wright was in several classic Golden Age  films.  In The Golden Honeymoon, they were believable as an old married couple, who constantly argue but still clearly love each other.

The Gardener (2021, directed by Becca Hirani and Scott Chambers)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Volker (Gary Daniels) and his gang break into an English manor, hoping to rob the place.  Since their last home invasion led to a pregnant woman getting shot in the head (though the actress continued to visibly breathe onscreen even after her character expired), Volker has planned this robbery down to the least little detail.  However, it turns out that the family that was supposed to be on a trip is actually home for the holidays!  Also, their Hungarian gardener, Peter (Robert Bronzi), is a former soldier who returns to his former ways to protect the family.  Armed with his gardening tools, Peter takes out the bad guys, one at a time.

Robert Bronzi is an actor whose career centers around him bearing a passable resemblance to Charles Bronson.  He also appeared in Death Kiss and, earlier this week, Brad reviewed him in Escape From Death Block 13.  In this movie, he’s not really a gardener just like Charles Bronson wasn’t really a mechanic in the film of the same name.  Get it?  This is one of the Bronzi films I’ve seen in which he wasn’t dubbed.  Peter is from Eastern Europe, just like Bronzi, so Bronzi gets to speak with his own voice.  He still doesn’t say much, though.  Bronzi actually looks less and less like Charles Bronson every time that I see him.  If he ever lost the mustache, his career would end.  Even more importantly, Bronzi doesn’t have Bronson’s screen presence.  Bronson could accomplish a lot just by narrowing his eyes.  Brozni always seems like he’s not sure where the camera is.  The movie plods along without much suspense or humor, as if we’re supposed to take a low-budget film with a Charles Bronson imitator seriously.

The Gardener is a film with a plot so thin that I don’t think the real Charles Bronson would have wasted his time with it.

 

Wild Thing (1987, directed by Max Reid)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

After his hippie parents are murdered by a drug dealer named Cutter (Robert Davi!), a young boy is taken in and raised by a homeless woman (Betty Buckley).  The boy eventually grows up to be Wild Thing (Robert Knepper), an urban Tarzan who jumps from rooftop to rooftop at night and who protects the neighborhood for evil doers (like Cutter).  A social worker (Kathleen Quinlan) hears the legend of Wild Thing and eventually finds him.  She continues his education, explaining to him why people do the “body bump.”  Carrying a bow and arrow and accompanied by a surprisingly loyal cat, Wild Thing fights the bad guys and seeks revenge for his parents.

Wild Thing is one of those movies that should be incredibly bad but somehow it isn’t.  John Sayles was one of three writers to work on the script (Sayles was the only one to get credit) and the film has a self-aware sense of humor similar to the scripts that Sayles wrote for films like Alligator, Battle Beyond The Stars, and Piranha.  A young Robert Knepper is probably about as convincing as anyone could be as an urban Tarzan who speaks broken English and who carries a bow and arrow as he makes his way across the rooftops of his neighborhood.  As always, Robert Davi is a good villain.  Davi knows that he’s appearing in a live action comic book and he gives an appropriate performance.

Wild Thing is a surprisingly enjoyable movie and yes, the song Wild Thing is heard in the movie but not as much as you might think.  There’s a few scenes where the song starts to play and is then cut off, as if the movie is teasing our expectations.  I just wish Sam Kinison had been invited to perform his version.

 

Sabotage (2014, directed by David Ayer)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Atlanta Homicide detective Caroline Brentwood (Olivia Williams) and her partner, Darius Jackson (Harold Perrineau), are the primaries on the murder of a former DEA agent.  Their investigation leads them to an elite special operations team led by “Breacher” Wharton (Arnold Schwarzenegger).  Wharton and his crew were previously suspended for six months while the FBI investigates their last raid and why there was a $10 million dollar discrepancy between the amount of money the team reporter and the amount of money the FBI was expecting to be recovered.  Someone is murdering the members of Breacher’s team one-by-one.  Breacher and Brentwood investigate the murder and what happened to the money but they both discover that they can’t trust anyone.

Sabotage has got a cast that is full of talent and familiar faces, including Sam Worthington, Mireille Enos, Terrence Howard, Joe Manganiello, Martin Donavon, and Josh Holloway.  It also has one truly great action scene, a violent chase down a busy Atlanta street that comes to sudden and very bloody conclusion.  The film’s final scene takes Sabotage into western territory, with Schwarzenegger dominating the screen like a larger-than-life Sergio Leone hero.  It’s just too bad that the rest of the movie isn’t as a good as its final shot or that one chase scene.  Unfortunately, most of the film feels repetitive and half-baked, with way too much time being wasted on supporting characters who tend to blend together.

Arnold Schwarzenegger gives one of his better performances.  When he made Sabotage, he was no longer a governor and he was also no longer an automatic box office draw and there’s a tired weariness to his performance.  Unfortunately, the rest of the cast is either miscast (Olivia Williams) or stuck playing one-dimensional characters (everyone else).  There’s enough good action sequences to keep Sabotage watchable and Schwarzenegger shows that he can actually be a very good actor but it’s also easy to see why this film didn’t reignite his his career.

The Maltese Falcon (1931, directed by Roy Del Ruth)

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Detective Sam Spade (Ricardo Cortez) may be an immoral lech but when his partner, Miles Archer, is murdered, Sam sets out to not only figure out who did it but to also eliminate himself as a suspect.  Sam was having an affair with Miles’s wife, Ivy (Thelma Todd).  Sam’s investigation leads to him falling for the mysterious Miss Wonderly (Bebe Daniels) and getting involved with a trio of flamboyant criminals who are searching for a famous relic, the Maltese Falcon.  Dudley Digges plays Casper Gutman.  Otto Matieson plays Dr. Joel Cairo.  Dwight Frye plays the gunsel, Wilmer, who Gutman says he “loves … like a son.”

The first film adaptation of Dashiell Hammett’s classic detective novel is overshadowed by the version that John Huston would direct ten years later.  That’s not surprising.  There’s a lot of good things about the first version but it’s never as lively than John Huston’s version and neither Dudley Digges nor Otto Matieson can compare to Sydney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre.  Of the supporting cast, Dwight Frye makes the best impression as the twitchy Wilmer and Bebe Daniels and Thelma Todd are both sexy as the story’s femme fatales.  That doesn’t mean that they’re better than their counterparts in John Huston’s film.  It just means they all bring a different energy to their roles and it’s interesting to see how the same story can be changed by just taking a slightly different approach.  Elisha Cook, Jr. was perfect for Huston’s version of the story.  Dwight Frye is similarly perfect for Roy Del Ruth’s version.

Needless to say, Ricardo Cortez can’t really compare to Humphrey Bogart.  But, if you can somehow block the memory of Bogart in the role from your mind, Cortez actually does give a good performance as Spade.  Because this was a pre-code film, Cortez can lean more into Spade’s sleaziness than Bogart could.  Also, because this was a pre-code film, the first Maltese Falcon doesn’t have to be as circumspect about the story’s subtext.  Spade obviously tries to sleep with every woman he meets and is first seen letting a woman out of his office.  (The woman stops to straighten her stockings.)  Gutman and Cairo’s relationship with Wilmer becomes much more obvious as well.  What’s strange is that, even though this Maltese Falcon is pre-code, it still ends with the type of ending that you would expect the production code to force onto a film like this.

If you’re going to watch The Maltese Falcon, the Huston version is the one to go with.  But the first version isn’t bad and it’s worth watching for comparison.

L.A. Crackdown (1987, directed by Joseph Mehri)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Karen (Pamela Dixon) is a tough L.A. cop who is sick of seeing runaways disappear into the system.  Fionna (Kit Harrison) and Angie (Tricia Parks) are two delinquents who have been used and abused on the streets.  They’ve worked as prostitutes and been forced to appear in films with titles like Cockadile Dundee.  (L.A. Crackdown actually opens with the filming of Cockadile Dundee.)  Karen tries to rescue them from the streets by springing them from jail and taking them home with her.  At first, her husband (Jeffrey Olsen) is not amused but Karen is determined to do the right thing.  After several long stretches of nothing happening and two montages of the women bonding, things go downhill, Karen loses everything, and she decides to get justice by killing a bunch of drug dealers.

I knew what I was getting myself into when I saw the Troma logo at the start of this movie.  I respect Troma’s willingness to distribute anything that they can get for cheap but that doesn’t make it any easier to sit through their movies.  L.A. Crackdown is slowly paced, badly acted, and looks like it was lit by a flashlight with a dying battery.  There are two action scenes, one at the beginning and one towards the end, that manage to be presentable but the rest of the film is full of the long, dull stretches that Troma is known for.  Karen seeking revenge on the drug dealers should be the whole point of the movie but it takes forever to reach that point.  The revenge isn’t bad but you’ll probably fall asleep before you get there.

L.A. Crackdown is on Tubi.  If you’re like me, you might make the mistake of watching it because you’ve gotten it mixed up with a Michael Mann film called L.A. Takedown.  Take my word for it.  Michael Mann has nothing to do with L.A. Crackdown.