Hello! How is everyone? It’s so great to be back! I hope you’re all doing fabulously as only my smart, brilliant audience can 😊
So… theaters are coming back into fashion! Yaayy! I totally knew they would. Streaming is fun, but you simply can’t duplicate the feeling of community you get in a theater. We are only human (s* you, Agent Smith).
While we’re still sort of stuck hanging out at home mostly, what did you watch? Here are some of my faves:
CONCRETE COWBOY
A wayward young man (Caleb McLaughlin) goes to see his estranged (cowboy) dad (Idris Elba) and gets his nonsensical ideas about life straightened out. Lovely, lovely little flick—not maudlin, not sentimental, not preachy, amazing acting, nice cinematography. I put this on ‘for just a minute’ and ended up watching an hour. It’s worth the time, if only for Elba. Here’s the trailer:
THUNDER FORCE
I tried to watch this. I really did! I couldn’t sit through even ten minutes. How they got Octavia Spencer to sign on is the real mystery. It’s about two young women (played by Octavia Spencer and Melissa McCarthy) who were childhood friends, now trying to reconnect by… using newfound superpowers? It’s a silly story, but that’s fine. Audiences will go along with anything! What tanks it is the poor acting and shoddy script. Octavia does the best she can with what she’s been given, but Melissa… well, she has good screen presence. Her acting is another story entirely. I wouldn’t waste my time on this. Here’s the trailer:
THE SINNER
Completely by chance, I started with Season 3, which is about an accident involving a young man (with a pregnant wife) who gets a visit from a college friend. Bill Pullman (Spaceballs, Independence Day, The Last Seduction) plays the insurance investigator, and the rest of the cast is competent. I couldn’t find any faults with the episodes, save for the score which seemed intrusive and redundant at times. Otherwise, I was actually entranced by the gripping drama—for the first episode I watched. I did lose interest subsequently—had to give in to the charms of Brooklyn 99—but only because I am not into drama the way I used to be. If you like the genre, this show will suck you right in. Had it been a movie, I may have watched it all the way through. See the trailer here:
COMING 2 AMERICA
The king of Zamunda (Eddie Murphy) has a very talented and savvy daughter (Kiki Layne); but he still needs a son to marry to the daughter of neighboring warlord Izzi (Wesley Snipes) of Nextdoria (yup!). So off he goes to America to find the son (Jermaine Fowler) he created during his fun jaunts back in the day in Queens. This is very predictable, but entertaining—even heartwarming—thanks to the interpretation by the very famous cast (James Earl Jones, Arsenio Hall, Wesley Snipes, Leslie Jones, Tracy Morgan, and more). The magic of the original is certainly not there, and it’s completely forgettable—but I wasn’t expecting more than a few laughs and some lighthearted nonsense out of this. Which it delivered. However, if I had to guess, I’d say it got as many views as it did because it was released on streaming during the lock down. View the trailer here:
INTO THE WILD
This might make you throw out a lot of junk in your house. I highly recommend it to those trying desperately to throw out junk, but unable to part with it for whatever reason. It’s from 2007 (written and directed by Sean Penn), but for some reason it showed up on the ‘latest and greatest’ part of my Netflix home screen. It’s a very sad story, and weirdly… destabilizing. The acting is incredible (in particular, Hal Holbrook is amazing as the elderly man the protagonist meets on his journey) and the cinematography, excellent. It’s also slow moving, but well worth the patience. Chris McCandless, a privileged young man (played by Emile Hirsch), has just graduated from Yale, and his whole life is one tasty dessert just waiting for him to dig in. But, turned off by the pressure to perform, and disgusted by society in general, he decides to go solo backpacking in sparsely populated areas of Montana and Alaska, and vanishes. The ending will destroy you. But you must watch the whole movie! See the trailer here:
And that’s it for this time. It’s been great writing this for you! I hope you had fun reading it. Let me know how you feel, here, or out there! You know I’m everywhere… 😊
