The Eric Roberts Collection: 69 Parts (dir by Ari Taub)

Posted on April 18, 2025 by Lisa Marie Bowman

I’m going to guess that there’s quite a backstory to the production of the film …. well, I’m really not even sure what to call the film.

The version that I just watched on Tubi was called 69 parts and it clocked in at a little over 90 minutes. It’s the story of gangsters, cops, and one hapless law student in 1979 New York. Jack (Ryan O’Callaghan) needs money to go to law school. His best friend, gambling addict Gino (Johnny Solo), arranges for Jack to get a loan from his uncle, Dennis (Aidan Redmond). However, Gino swears that he can double the loan if Jack goes with him to the tracks. Unfortunately, Gino’s hot tip turns out to be a bust so now Jack is broke and can’t pay back the money. So, Dennis forced Jack to marry Dennis’s mistress so that she can get her green card but then Dennis gets jealous and decides to kill Jack but then he discovers that Jack is the son of an imprisoned criminal associate (Eric Roberts). It’s all a bit too complicated for its own good and the use of multiple narrators, many of whom sound exactly alike, doesn’t make the film any easier to follow.

Tubi claims that 69 Parts was released in 2022. However, on the IMDb, there’s a film called 79 Parts, which is listed as being a few minutes shorter than 69 Parts but it has the exact same cast and the exact same plot. This version was released in 2016, six years before 69 Parts. And then there’s 79 Parts: The Directors Cut, which clocks in at over two hours and which was released in 2019. In short, there appears to be multiple versions of this film and really, I have to be a little bit impressed by the determination necessary to keep re-editing, re-titling, and re-releasing the film.

As for the film itself, the version I saw was a bit too busy and difficult to follow but I appreciated the work that went into recreating the 70s. That obviously take some effort. Aidan Redmond was properly avuncular and menacing as Dennis but Jack was such a wimpy character that it was difficult to really care about him. As for Eric Roberts, he appears for about five minutes and is even less impressed with Jack than I was. Maybe Eric gets to do more in the director’s cut.

Previous Eric Roberts Films That We Have Reviewed:

Music Video of the Day: We Belong Together (2005, dir by Brett Ratner)

Posted on April 18, 2025 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Today, we wish a happy birthday to Eric Roberts!

In our music video of the day, Roberts nearly marries Mariah Carey, just for her to leave him for Wentworth Miller. This video is a sequel to the video for It’s Like That and Mariah wears the same wedding dress when she married music exec Tommy Mottola. (Make of that, what you will.) Personally, I think Eric dodged a bullet here because everyone knows that he and Eliza were meant to be.

Enjoy!

Previous Eric Roberts Films That We Have Reviewed:

Song of the Day: The Midnight Trail by Tangerine Dream

Posted on April 17, 2025 by Lisa Marie Bowman

For today’s song of the day, how about a little mood music from Tangerine Dream?

Music Video of the Day: Mi Ami Mi Odi by Elodie (2025, dir by Attilio Cusani)

Posted on April 17, 2025 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Today’s music video of the day comes to us from Italy but you probably already guessed that.

Enjoy!

Song of the Day: The Wicked Flee, composed by Carter Burwell

Posted on April 16, 2025 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Today’s song of the day is this beautiful and haunting piece from 2010’s True Grit.

FREEDOM!!!

Posted on April 16, 2025 by Bradley Crain

I’m passionate about movies, but my day job consists of providing high quality tax planning and preparation services for a wide variety of clients in the Central Arkansas area. After a couple of months of 70-90 hour work weeks, April 16th is the day that I can begin to focus a little less on work and a little more on the things I truly love. I can’t wait to continue to share my passion for movies, music, Charles Bronson, Chow Yun-Fat, and so many other things with all of you. I need a few days to get some rest and get my mind straight, but I’ll soon be back to sharing my opinions and my life! Thanks to all of you who read my work! ❤️

Music Video Of The Day: Never Felt Better by Everything Is Recorded, ft. Sampha and Florence Welch (2025, dir by Kristian Mercado and Mela Murder)

Posted on April 16, 2025 by Lisa Marie Bowman

I’ve never felt better either!

Enjoy!

Film Review: Short Cuts (dir by Robert Altman)

Posted on April 15, 2025 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Opening with a swarm of helicopters spaying for medflies and ending with an earthquake, 1993’s Short Cuts is a film about life in Los Angeles.

An ensemble piece, it follows several different characters as they go through their own personal dramas. Some of them are married and some of them are destined to be forever single but they’re all living in varying states of desperation. Occasionally, the actions of one character will effect the actions of another character in a different story but, for the most part, Short Cuts is a portrait of people who are connected only by the fact that they all live in the same city. There are 22 principal characters in Short Cuts and each one thinks that they are the star of the story.

Jerry Kaiser (Chris Penn) cleans the pools of rich people while, at home, his wife, Lois (Jennifer Jason Leigh), takes care of their baby and works as a phone sex operator. Jerry’s best friend is a makeup artist named Bill (Robert Downey, Jr.) who enjoys making his wife, Honey (Lili Taylor), looks like a corpse so that he can take her picture. One of her photographs is seen by a fisherman (Buck Henry) who has already discovered one actual corpse that weekend. He and his buddies, Vern (Huey Lewis) and Stuart (Fred Ward), discovered a dead girl floating in a river and didn’t report it until after they were finished fishing. (The sight of Vern unknowingly pissing on the dead body is one of the strongest in director Robert Altman’s filmography.)

Stuart’s wife, Claire (Anne Archer), is haunted by Stuart’s delay in reporting the dead body. A chance meeting Dr. Ralph Wyman (Matthew Modine) and his wife, artist Marian (Julianne Moore), leads to an awkward dinner between the two couples. Claire works as a professional clown and Ralph ends up wearing her clown makeup while his marriage falls apart.

Earlier, Claire was stopped and hit on by a smarmy policeman named Gene Shepard (Tim Robbins), who just happens to be married to Marian’s sister, Sherri (Madeleine Stowe). Gene is already having an affair with Betty Weathers (Frances McDormand), the wife of a helicopter pilot named Stormy (Peter Gallagher). When Stormy discovers that Betty has been cheating, he takes a creative revenge on her house.

Doreen Pigott (Lily Tomlin) lives in a trailer park with her alcoholic husband, Earl (Tom Waits). Driving home from her waitressing job, Doreen hits a young boy. The boy says he’s okay but when he gets home, he passes out. His parents, news anchorman Howard Finnegan (Bruce Davison) and his wife, Anne (Andie MacDowell), rush him to the hospital, where his doctor is Ralph Wyman. As Howard waits for his son to wake up, he has a revealing conversation with his long-estranged father (Jack Lemmon, showing up for one scene and delivering an amazing monologue). Meanwhile, a baker named Andy (Lyle Lovett) repeatedly calls the Finnegan household, wanting to know when they’re going to pick up their son’s birthday cake.

Based on the short stories of Raymond Carver and directed by Robert Altman, Short Cuts can sometimes feel like a spiritual descendent of Altman’s Nashville. The difference between this film and Nashville is that Short Cuts doesn’t have the previous film’s satiric bite. As good as Nashville is, it’s a film that can be rather snarky towards it character and the town in which it is set. Nashville is used as a metaphor for America coming apart at the seams. Short Cuts, on the other hand, is a far more humanistic film, featuring characters who are flawed but, with a few very notable exceptions, well-intentioned. If Nashville seem to be a portrait of a society on the verge of collapse, Short Cuts is a film about how that society ended up surviving.

It’s not a perfect film. There’s an entire storyline featuring Annie Ross and Lori Singer that I didn’t talk about because I just found it to be annoying to waste much time with. (The Ross/Singer storyline was the only one not to be based on a Carver short story.) The conclusion of Chris Penn’s storyline wasn’t quite as shocking as it was obviously meant to be. But, flaws and all, Altman and Carver’s portrait of humanity does hold our attention and it leaves us thinking about connections made and sometimes lost. Seen today, Short Cuts is a portrait of life before social media and iPhones and before humanity started living online. It’s a time capsule of a world that once was.

Late Night Retro Television Review: Pacific Blue 1.13 “All Jammed Up”

Posted on April 15, 2025 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Welcome to Late Night Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Tuesdays, I will be reviewing Pacific Blue, a cop show that aired from 1996 to 2000 on the USA Network! It’s currently streaming everywhere, though I’m watching it on Tubi.

This week, season one comes to an end!

Episode 1.13 “All Jammed Up”

(Dir by Ronald Victor Garcia, originally aired on May 25th, 1996)

Here we are at the end of the first season of the show and both Pacific Blue and Tim Palmero’s bicycle squad are still struggling to justify their existence.

There’s a couple of thieves robbing people who are stuck in traffic. The thieves ride bicycles. You can literally see Palermo light up as he realizes that he’s finally run into a criminal who can reasonably be subdued by his bike patrol. Of course, it still takes them forever to catch the guy. Whenever the bike criminal would escape and Palermo or TC would say, “We’ll get him next time,” I was reminded of Mike Brady trying to sell his terrible architectural designs in The Brady Bunch Movie and assuring his desperate boss that the next client would definitely want their gas station or restaurant to look just like the Brady house.

Meanwhile, Chris and and Cory go undercover as escorts in order to catch an arms dealer who is staying at a hotel and who has a thing for sex workers. Chris is not happy with assignment and complains about it. Normally, I would agree because it really is a degrading assignment. (The arms dealers can be identified only by a tattoo on his behind.) But Chris whines about everything so I have to admit that I didn’t have as much sympathy as I should have had.

Cory, along with her undercover work, is upset because her boyfriend (Ken Olandt) refuses to tell his parents that she’s a bike cop. Her boyfriend’s father was played by Robert Pine, the sergeant from CHiPs. That was amusing.

Meanwhile, Elvis wants to ask someone out. TC gives him advice and, in a nod to Cyrano, tells Elvis what to say. Hey, TC — there’s a crime wave going on! Or maybe you didn’t notice….

This was a pretty pointless way to end the season but …. eh, it’s Pacific Blue. It’s pretty much what I was expecting from this show. This first season was pretty bad. I can’t really think of a single episode that didn’t get on my nerves in some way. Way too much time was spent this season on people saying, “They ride bikes?” Yes, they ride bikes. They look stupid and I would be kind of angry if I was the victim of a crime and any of these losers showed up but at some point, both the show and the audience will have to accept that it is what it is. The show is about cops on bicycles. Every episode during the first season seemed to be designed to make us go, “Okay, they’re real cops!” But if you’re still having to convince the audience of that thirteen episodes in, it’s a problem.

Oh well. Season 2 starts next week!

Film Review: Into the Wild (dir by Sean Penn)

Posted on April 15, 2025 by Lisa Marie Bowman

He went looking for America but couldn’t find it.

That’s not actually the tag line that was used to advertise 2007’s Into The Wild but perhaps it should have been. Based on the true story of Chris McCandless, a college graduate who gave away all of his money and then roamed the country for two years before starving to death in an abandoned bus in Alaska, Into The Wild seems to be Sean Penn’s attempt to make a modern-day Easy Rider. Just as Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda crossed the country and met several different people over the course of that seminal road film, Into The Wild follows Emile Hirsch’s Chris McCandless as he takes on the identity of Alexander Supertramp and hikes across the continent. Along the way, he meets and befriends hippies (Catherine Keener and Brian H. Dierker), blue collar workers (Vince Vaughn), wayward teenagers (Kristen Stewart), and, most poignantly, a retired man (Hal Holbrook) who sincerely tries to help Chris make peace with his wanderlust.

You would think that this would be the type of film that would bring out Sean Penn’s worst directorial instincts but Penn actually directs with a very real sensitivity and a willingness to see the good in just about everyone that Chris meets. It is true that, especially at the start of the film, Chris can sometimes be a bit difficult to take. He’s so self-righteous and sure of himself. He mistakes his college diploma for being a badge of experience and occasionally, he can come across as being incredibly condescending. But, as the film progresses, Chris starts to realize that he doesn’t know everything and that he can’t do everything by himself. Sometimes, he does need help, even if he doesn’t want to admit it. The film’s most moving moments feature Chris and Hal Holbrook’s Ron Franz. Ron has the years of experience that Chris lacks and Ron also becomes one of the few people to whom Chris is willing to truly listen. And yet, when Ron offers to adopt Chris and give him a permanent home, Chris’s response is to promise to talk to him about it when Chris returns from Alaska. As Chris leaves, it’s obvious that Ron knows that he’s never going to see Chris again. Dying in Alaska, Chris finally makes some sort of inner peace with the parents (William Hurt and Marcia Gay Harden) and the sister (Jena Malone) that he earlier abandoned. It’s an amazingly touching scene. Penn, whose other directorial efforts have been a bit didactic, seems to be willing to grant a certain grace to everyone in the film, even those whose politics or cultural attitudes he might not necessarily share. Penn not only captures the visual beauty of the America wilderness but also the beauty of the people, a beauty that too many other directors chose to downplay.

It’s a strong film and certainly the best of Penn’s directorial efforts. Emile Hirsch is not always likable as Chris but, then again, the heart of the film is found in the people that Hirsch meets and Penn gets excellent performances from his entire supporting cast. Hal Holbrook received a much deserved Oscar nomination. I also liked Vince Vaughn’s performance as guy who teaches Chris about hard work before getting arrested for stealing cable and also Jena Malone as Chris’s sister, the one person who understands him, even if she’s not invited to travel with him.

Into The Wild is a poignant portrayal of both wanderlust and the often-neglected corners of America. Did Chris find a little of something that he was looking for before he died in that bus? One can only hope.