Category Archives: Film Review

SXSW 2020 Review: Blocks (dir by Bridget Moloney)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

I have to admit that, when it comes to people spitting things up, I’m kind of a wimp.  It’s something that I typically have a hard time watching.  It’s one reason why, in college, I usually left the room if someone had too much to drink.  I seriously didn’t want to be there when that person started throwing up a combination of beer and nacho cheese.  I mean, bleh!

So, Blocks was not always easy for me to watch.  Blocks is a 12-minute comedy about Ashleigh (Claire Coffee), the mother of two young children who, one day, starts to vomit up toy blocks.  Now, fortunately, the film doesn’t get particularly graphic when it comes to the vomiting.  Usually, we only see the aftermath, which is often Claire lying on the floor, exhausted and surrounded by toy blocks while her children (and sometimes, her husband) knock on the bathroom door and demand to know why she’s not spending time with them.  Ashleigh can’t tell anyone about the toy blocks, of course.  She just pretends like the family has always owned the toy blocks that are mysteriously appearing around the house.  Her children refuse to play with them.  Eventually, Ashleigh finds a use for them.

As I said, I’m a wimp when it comes to people vomiting but still, Blocks was a well-done and frequently funny film.  In her introduction to the film, director Bridget Moloney says that the film was based on her own feelings and experiences as a mother and I think anyone who has ever been stuck in a house with two hyperactive, inquisitive kids will be able to relate to Ashleigh’s feeling of being overwhelmed.  Before I watched Blocks, I was going through one of my “I really want to start a family now!” phases.  Having watched it, I now think that maybe I should wait a year or two because, seriously — if I can’t handle someone vomiting legos, I don’t know how I’ll be able to handle all of the disgusting stuff that toddlers do.

Blocks, like many other films that were going to be shown at this year’s SXSW festival, is currently available on Amazon for a limited time.

Short Film Review: $tack$ (dir by Gerald Webb)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Sometimes, you have to laugh.

That may seem like odd advice to give at this moment in history because, right now, there’s a lot of people who are convinced that we’ll never share a joke or a smile again.  They look at the news about the spread of COVID-19 and the empty grocery store shelves and everything else that’s going on and they say to themselves, “Laughter is dead.”  Of course, what they’re failing to understand is that often, it’s laughter and comedy that help people survive tough times.  It’s much easier to deal with a problem if you laugh at it first.  Sacrificing one’s sense of humor is the first step towards surrender and surrendering is not what we, as a people, are about.

The 7 and a half-minute short film, $tack$, opens with a familiar cinematic situation.  Two men are in an underground garage, standing next to their car and waiting for someone else to arrive.  They exchange a few words, the type of tough guy talk that we’ve heard in countless crime films.  Both of them are armed.  Both of them know that the situation is serious.  Both of them are ready for whatever happens.

Another vehicle pulls up and more people get out.  More guns are displayed.  A sell is being made.  The second group of people is assured that they’re getting the best, “pure white.”

As I said, it’s a situation that we’ve seen in countless crime films but this one has a humorous COVID-19 inspired twist, one that I will not spoil here.  It’s a clever little twist, though and it’s one to which everyone — and I do mean everyone — will be able to relate.  Making his directorial debut, Gerald Webb plays the action straight, even when $tack$‘s main joke is revealed.  The audience may laugh but, to the characters in the film, there’s nothing more important than the business transaction being conducted in that underground garage.  And really, who can blame them?

A rap and a music video play over the end credits, on that not only details the hardships of living in the COVID-19 era but which also pays tribute to all of the essential workers on the front lines, which is a nice touch.  If nothing else, it’ll make you feel better about the times that we’re living than watching a hundred “this is the new normal” brand name commercials will.

Be sure to track down $tack$.  It’ll make you laugh and that’s an important thing right now.

Recruits (1986, directed by Rafal Zielinski)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Stop me if this sounds familiar.

The governor of Californa is planning on visiting the small town of Corvette so that he can announce the opening of a new highway.  The mayor is concerned that the town’s small police force might not be big enough to handle all of the pomp and drama that goes along with an executive visit.  He orders Captain Magruder (Mike McDonald) to lower the department’s standards and to recruit civilians off the street so that they can quickly be trained to become police officers.  Magruder starts by going to down to the jail and recruiting for low-level offenders.

If you think this sounds a lot like Police Academy, you’re absolutely right.  Just as Police Academy was pretty much a rip-off of Stripes, Recruits is a rip-off of Police Academy.  Once again, the recruits are a lovable gang of misfits who screw up big time before getting a chance to prove that they have what it takes to be real cops.  There’s the usual beach patrol scenes, a lot of nudity, and one manic nerdy recruit whose antics would inspire even Jerry Lewis to say, “Tone it down a little.”  However, there is a major difference between Recruits and Police Academy.  In Recruits, there is no lovable Commandant Lassard.  Instead, Captain Magruder wants the recruits to fail because he’s hoping that the governor will fire the mayor and appoint Magruder in his place.  I’m not sure that’s how municipal politics actually works but maybe it’s just a California thing.

As far as brainless rip-offs of movies that weren’t particularly good to begin with go, Recruits isn’t that bad.  The humor is even more juvenile here than it was in Police Academy and trying to apply too much logic to the plot will make your brain hurt but it’s a breezy 90 minutes and it’s got a game cast, a few of whom went on to better things.  (Lolita Davidovich, for instance, is the recruit who ends up naked in a limo that turns out to belong to the governor.)  Jon Mikl Thor made his feature film debut as a recruit named Thunderhead and he gets to battle a bunch of outlaw bikers while one his songs plays in the background.  It’s a pretty cool scene.  If you’re nostalgic for these types of unapologetically dumb comedies, Recruits will satisfy that nostalgia.

Lifetime Film Review: Deadly Mile High Club (dir by Doug Campbell)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Last night, I watched the latest Lifetime premiere, Deadly Mile High Club!

Deadly Mile High Club tells the story of three people who end up flying the unfriendly skies together.  Tanya (Allison McAtee) is a flight instructor who has been haunted ever since the tragic crash that took the life of her lover and co-pilot.

Jake (Marc Herrmann) is the handsome guy who has a go-nowhere warehouse job where he works for his constantly critical mother-in-law, Margaret (Diane Robin).  Jake has decided to make some changes in his life, starting with learning how to fly.

And finally, Annie (Anna Marie Dobbins) is Jake’s wife.  They’ve been married for six years and, unfortunately, they’ve hit a rough patch.  Annie is busy going to school and Jake is constantly fighting with Annie’s mother.  When Jake tells Annie that she sounds just like her mother, Annie exiles him to the living room couch and good for her!  Annie likes to wear pink.  In particular, she likes to wear a pink hat, which is something that comes back to haunt both her and Jake later on in the movie.

Jake decides to hire Tanya to teach him how to fly.  This quickly turns out to be a mistake because, while Tanya is a good teacher, she’s also totally obsessed with Jake.  After Jake tells her that he and Annie had a fight the night before, Tanya flies him out to Palm Springs and suggests that they spend the night at a hotel.  Jake eventually turns her down but later on, during one of their lessons, Tanya has Jake fly over his house.  He looks down and he sees a strange man kissing a woman wearing a pink hat in the driveway.  Is Annie cheating on him!?

Realizing that things are just getting too strange, Jake attempts to switch over to a different flight instructor.  That flight instructor is named Gonzo (Damon K. Sperber) and he is, without a doubt, one of the greatest supporting characters to ever appear in a Lifetime movie.  Gonzo lives up to his name, dressing like an old World War II pilot and then doing dangerous stunts in an old school biplane while his employees — who are all wearing retro purple flight attendant uniforms — assure everyone watching that flying is safer than driving.  I won’t go into what happens to Gonzo but let’s just say that Tanya has a way of getting what she wants.

Anyway, Deadly Mile High Club is a lot of fun.  It’s one of those Lifetime films that fully embraces the melodrama and goes cheerfully over the top with a wink and a smile.  Tanya is the type of psycho who has no problem trying to trick someone into pushing their wife out of a plane and the entire cast appears to be having a ball with their crazed characters.  Allison McAtee especially does a great job as the unhinged Tanya and she delivers all of her lines with just the right amount of menace and humor.  Deadly Mile High Club is an entertaining film, one that takes the usual Lifetime tropes of the psycho stalker and the clueless husband and the loyal wife and which bring new life to them by putting them up in the sky.  It’s also a film that has a nicely self-aware sense of humor, which makes it all the more fun to watch.

Deadly Mile High Club was on last night and it will undoubtedly be on again so keep an eye out for it.  And definitely, keep watching the skies!

Police Academy 7: Mission to Moscow (1994, directed by Alan Metter)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Russia has a problem.  Mob boss Konstantine Konali (Ron Perlman, slumming) has created a video game so addictive that the people playing it don’t even realize that it’s actually a sophisticated computer virus that allows Konali to take control of almost any security system.  As a result, Moscow has been hit by a string of robberies.  The Moscow police commandant, Nikolaivich Rakov (Christopher Lee, slumming even more than Perlman) knows that he doesn’t have the resources to stop Konali so, as so many have done before him, he decides to contact Commandant Eric Lassard (George Gaynes) and asks for help.

In others words: Police Academy Goes To Russia!

Well, some of the Police Academy graduates get to go.  After the box office failure of City Under Siege, there was a five year hiatus between that movie and the latest (and last) installment in the Police Academy film saga.  During that time, the juvenile boys who made up the franchise’s target audience all grew up and became too cool to admit that they had ever seen a Police Academy film.  By the time Mission to Moscow went into production, most of the stars of Police Academy had also either moved on or desperately wanted to create the impression that they had something better to do than go to Russia to take part in the final stand of an aging franchise.

As a result, Lassard only takes Tacklberry (David Graf), Sound Effects Machine (Michael Winslow), Callahan (Leslie Easterbrook), Harris (G.W. Bailey), and Cadet Connors (Charlie Schlatter) with him to the Russia.  Cadet Connors is a computer expert and he is obviously meant to be the new Steve Guttenberg/Matt McCoy style wiseass.  He ends up falling for a pretty Russian translator (Claire Forlani).  Cadet Connors tries his best but he’s no Carey Mahoney.

Give Mission to Moscow some credit for predicting both the rise of the Russian Mafia and the danger of computer viruses.  Otherwise, Mission to Moscow ends the Police Academy franchise in a desultory manner.  The cast looks old and even the usually reliable Sound Effects Machine doesn’t bring much energy to his shtick.  Police Academy: Mission to Moscow was one of the first American movies to be filmed in Moscow after the collapse of the Soviet Union and it even features an actor standing in for Boris Yeltsin.  In the tradition of a family sitcom doing a special episode of Epcot Center, there’s plenty of footage of the cast standing in front of all of the landmarks but otherwise, Mission to Moscow doesn’t do much with its setting.  It’s interesting as historical trivia but forgettable as a movie.

10 years after the series began, Mission to Moscow brought the Police Academy films to a close, not with a bang but with a very exhausted whimper.  There was a syndicated tv series featuring the Sound Effects Machine that aired in 1997 but I never saw an episode and I was surprised to lean that it even existed.  It’s on YouTube so, someday, I’ll try to watch it.  Not today, though.

 

SXSW 2020 Review: Vert (dir by Kate Cox)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Happy 20th anniversary, Emelia (Nikki Amuka-Bird) and Jeff (Nick Frost)!

Emelia and Jeff are the couple who are at the center of the 12 minute short film, Vert.  They are the one of those couples who you just like from the minute that you see them together.  They have that sort of easy rapport that one would expect a couple to have after managing to stay together for 20 years.  They both live in a nice house.  They both appear to be very happy with their lives.  In fact, everything about them seems to be almost perfect.

What anniversary present do you get for the perfect couple?  How about a virtual reality system?  Through the use of “Vert,” Emelia and Jeff can not only go to a virtual world but they can also get a glimpse of their “ideal selves.”  I know, that sounds like kind of a crazy idea, doesn’t it?  I mean, how does anyone truly know who their ideal self would be?  Well, Vert knows!

And soon, Emelia and Jeff know as well….

Vert is one of those films that I watch and I wonder if maybe people in movies just don’t watch Black Mirror.  If they did, they would surely know better than to enter any sort of virtual reality.  But, what makes Vert such a thought-provoking film is how Emelia and Jeff react to what they discover in that virtual world.  Just a few years ago, the plot of Vert probably would have been played for easy laughs but today, it’s played for poignant and emotional drama.  In its way, Vert is a film that shows how far society and culture have come and also how far it has yet to go.

Vert is a nicely shot film, full of atmospheric images.  The cast all give sincere and believable performances and Nikki Amuka-Bird, in particular, does a good job with her role.  Vert is currently available, for a limited time, on Prime.

SXSW 2020 Review: Summer Hit (dir by Berthold Wahjudi)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Summer Hit is a sweet-natured, 20-minute film from Germany.

Laia (Martina Roura) is from Spain.  She’s adventurous and free-spirited and also somewhat irresponsible.  For instance, when she accidentally leaves her wallet at someone else’s apartment, she reacts by running out on a cab fare and then stealing a salad.  And, really — can you blame her?  I mean, if you don’t have the money, you don’t have the money.

Emil (Atli Benedikt) is from Iceland, which he describes as being cold and miserable.  He is somewhat quiet and seems to be a bit shy.  Overall, he seems like a nice guy.  He’s the type who, when you see him staggering about after taking a hit from a bong, you want to help him out.

Together …. THEY SOLVE CRIMES!

Well, no, actually, they don’t.  In fact, as we already discussed, Laia commits a few crimes after losing her wallet.  Instead, they’re both students who meet in Munich one summer and decide to have a commitment-free summer fling.  Unfortunately, it’s a lot easier to say that you’re going to be commitment-free than it is to actually do it.  After they have sex five or six times (Laia says five while Emil insists that it was six), Emil tells Laia that he thinks he might be in love with her.  Laia flees his apartment, leaving behind her wallet….

It’s a good film, one that briskly tells a story to which everyone can relate.  We’ve all been there.  Martina Roura and Atli Benedikt are both such likable performers that you can forgive the fact that both Laia and Emil can occasionally be a bit self-absorbed.  Neither one is perfect but then again, who is?  You hope for the best of them, even if you never quite believe that they’ll really stay together.

Summer Hit is available, for a limited time, on Prime.

SXSW 2020 Review: Run/On (dir by Daniel Newell Kaufman)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Run/On is a 13-minute short film that opens with a shot of a young boy balancing a fidget spinner on his forehead.

It’s haunting shot, one that is beautifully composed and which also tells you almost everything that you need to know about the film.  Fidget spinners are very useful to those of us who have ADD and who sometimes find it difficult to focus in a chaotic world.  I carry a fidget spinner everywhere that I go and, as strange as it apparently seems to some people, spinning it really does provide me with some focus and comfort.  Whenever I start to feel the world overwhelming me, I concentrate on watching it spin and, by the time that it stops, I’ve usually managed to calm down a bit.

The rest of Run/On deals with a boy named Luke and his mother and the time they spend waiting in a believably filthy Greyhound bus station.  Luke doesn’t speak throughout the entire film, but he sees and hears all of the chaos around him.  His mother, on the other hand, can’t stop talking.  She’s got two trash bags full of clothes and two tickets for a Greyhound.  She also has a gun in her purse, something Luke obviously finds to be concerning.

It’s a scary bus station.  Speaking as someone who once spent the night at the Greyhound bus station in Dallas (long story, don’t ask), I can say that this film did a great job of capturing just how scary, menacing, and exciting a big city bus station can be.  When Luke goes to a vending machine, we’re aware of the two men sitting in a corner of the bus station and watching.  When he later walks around the station, he passes a seedy-looking man on a phone.  All around him are people living their own lives of desperation and it’s somewhat frightening to witness it all.  It’s enough to make you want to run and keep running.

Run/On, with all of its mysteries, is currently available on Prime for a limited time.

Cinemax Friday: School Spirit (1985, directed by Alan Holleb)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Though he’s clearly in his late 30s and doesn’t have much of a personality, Billy Batson (Tom Nolan) was the most popular student at Lavatoire University.  Not only did all of the ladies love him but Billy was also Hogmeister, the king of school’s annual Hog Day.  Everyone at the university loved Billy except for crusty old President Grimshaw (Larry Linville).  Sadly, Billy was killed in a traffic accident that was entirely his fault.  He had gone down to the local roadhouse to use their condom machine and he was so excited afterward that he dropped the condom while driving.  When he reached down to grab it, he took his eyes off the road and one thing led to another.  The lesson?  Safe sex kills.  That’s not a great lesson today and it was an even worse one in the 80s but what are you going to do?

Billy’s dead.

Or is he?

No, don’t worry, he’s dead.  At the hospital, his spirit rises out of his body and he’s greeted by his deceased Uncle Pinky (John Finnegan).  Pinky says that it’s time to go to Heaven but Billy wants just one more day so that he can oversee Hog Day and get laid.  Pinky says no way but then he gets distracted by a comely nurse.  Billy escapes from the hospital and returns to the campus.

Even though he’s dead, Billy still appears in corporeal form and everyone can talk to him.  The only special power that Billy has is that he can wave his hand over his head and turn invisible.  Billy uses his powers once or twice and there’s the expected trip to the girl’s shower but that’s really the extent of School Spirit‘s supernatural angle.  The movie doesn’t really seem to be committed to the idea of Billy being dead.  Also, at no point in the film does Billy Batson say “Shazam!,” and that really is unforgivable.

Billy wants to sleep with snooty Judith Hightower (Elizabeth Foxx) but then he gets distracted by Grimshaw’s wild daughter (Marta Kober) and also by Madeleine Lavatoire (Daniele Arnaud), who is visiting from France.  It doesn’t take long for Billy to realize that Madeleine is the one for him but how can he fall in love with anyone when he’s going to have to go to the afterlife at midnight.  Appropriately, it all ends with a case of deus ex machina.  The ending makes no sense but neither does the rest of the movie so give School Spirit some credit for being consistent.

School Spirit is a stupid movie and, with the exception of Larry Linville and Marta Kober, the cast is a forgettable.  This is the type of comedy that used to show up regularly on late night Cinemax.  What it lacked in laughs, it made up for in boobs and that was really what the majority of its audience was watching for.  People who stayed up late to watch Cinemax were not the most demanding viewers in the world.  Today, the film will mostly appeal to people nostalgic for 80s sex comedies.  Why they would watch School Spirit instead of something like Risky Business, I don’t know.  Maybe they needed a movie to review for a blog.

Tomorrow, I finish off my Police Academy reviews by taking a look at Mission to Moscow!

SXSW 2020 Review: Dieorama (dir by Kevin Staake)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

“Lisa, I think you misspelled the title of the film….”

No, I didn’t!  For once, I have not misspelled anything.  This film is about dieoramas, which are dioramas that put an extra amount of emphasis on “die.”  Dieorama is also a ten minute profile of Abigail Goldman, who is an investigator for a public defender’s office in Washington and who spends her spare time making miniature crime scenes.

It may be a macabre habit but it’s hard not to admire the amount of effort and detail that Abigail puts into each grotesque little scene.  The dark humor of those involved in law enforcement is often commented upon and while it can sometimes seem insensitive to outsiders, it makes total sense when you consider that these are people who, on a daily basis, are regularly confronted with the worst that humanity has to offer.  Often times, that streak of morbid humor is a defense against giving into the darkness that’s all around them.

I mean, let’s face it.  We all have our ways of dealing with the bad things in the world.  Myself, I watch horror movies and I read true crime books.  When I was much younger, I used to regularly play dead and while everyone thought that was a strange habit, it was actually my way of laughing at my own mortality.  If you can mock death, then there’s no reason to fear it, right?  (That said, I grew out of the habit as I got older.)  My point is that we all deal with the grotesque in different ways.  Some people pretend not to see the darkness.  Some embrace the darkness.  And then others deal with the darkness by acknowledging, personalizing, and then conquering it.

Dieorama also features some interviews with the people who have collected Abigail’s work.  Some of them seem to be a bit apologetic for hanging a miniature crime scene on their wall but you know what?  Never apologize for your decorating tastes!  There’s no need to feel shame for appreciating the macabre.  In fact, in a crazy time, it may be the most sane thing that you can do.

Dieorama can currently be viewed on Prime.