Mobland [2025] Mad fun. I didn't realize Guy Ritchie didn't direct this (he's an exec producer), but it has his footprint all over this show. I thought the cast did a great job. All of them (Brosnan, Mirren, and Hardy), and Geoff Bell were terrific. I'm sure there will be a season 2 at some point.
Star Trek Discovery [Season 3, 2020] At the end of season 2, Discovery, housing technology that cannot be destroyed but too dangerous to stay anywhere in their universe instead went into the far future. Season 3 starts with them appearing some 900 years after they left. And it isn't a future they could have predicted. A cataclysm a century before had almost wiped out the Federation, and the current state of civilization has pockets of 900 years of advancement with pockets of 900 years of retreat. The situation is such that Discovery's technology is a much desired resource. Especially by the less scrupulous. And there's lots of those. I think I've made my opinion of seasons 1 and 2 pretty clear, and I'm not quite sure what I'm doing here except to exercise my morbid fascination in how bad they could continue messing things up. So far this show trampled on what I loved about Star Trek and tried (and failed) to cover up basic failings in storytelling with lots of glitz and nostalgic lip-service and I am going to tell you exactly what I think of this season in excruciating detail. I liked it. I really, really liked it. Right off the bat, getting rid of Klingons and Section 31 immeasurably improved everything. We started with a bit of Voyager and Andromeda to reset things, drawing on some of the basics of sci-fi storytelling before becoming Star Trek again for the first time. Somehow the new situation was a wakeup call for the crew. While I was always a fan of Saru and Burnham grew on me in the previous season, all the other characters started acting like I expect a crew to act. I even... I can't believe I'm saying this.. I even liked Tilly once she got her new job. They returned to the core Star Trek ideals of negotiation and understanding and forthrightness, not just as glib catchphrases but as the foundation of how they relate to others. One thing I didn't like was a strong emphasis on understanding people's underlying motivations. I'm more for weighing people's arguments at their face value and I think people are both too simple and too complex to be reduced to a pithy two-sentence description deduced from psychoanalyzing them. They also returned to computer effect overload (what the frak was that tubolift scene?!) and roller-coaster scene transitions in the final episode for some reason. But I liked the overall theme of connectedness. And the only other major failing was that 13 episodes wasn't enough.
Leatherheads (2008) d. George Clooney a reasonably funny comedy that was enjoyable enough so that I wasn’t bothered by the fact that it’s essentially a remake of Bull Durham only with the sort of resolution at the end that studio executives seem to like.
Happy Holidays from Cherry Lane - 2024 (Hallmark+) We're back at 7 Cherry Lane for another movie. 1960 - Eli (Benjamin Ayres) and Penny (Erica Durance) have had Eli's father in law, Walter (Serge Houde) in the house for a month after he broke his hip. Their son Alex (Noah Bromley) has to create a time capsule that will be buried and then dug up during his senior year of high school. They play the family of very different people who don't communicate well about as well as Hallmark can do it. 1998 - This is the same group as the 2023 film, set in the same year, telling the prequel version of the same story. I'm not sure why this wasn't set as 1997, other than a ridiculous oversight from Hallmark. With that said, this is how Nelson (James Denton) and Regina (Catherine Bell) first meet which leads into the first film where they're getting married and moving to Florida. The biggest positive here is the two terrible adult children actors from the 2023 movie are nowhere to be found because they get stuck trying to travel home. Instead, Ivy (Eva Tavares) who was the kid delivered by Regina's deceased husband in the 1973 era of the first film is around with her husband Hector (Simon Farrell) and they're much better than the actors cast as her actual children. 2015 - Beth (Dani Alvarado) and Max (Tim Carlson) are planning to get married on Christmas Eve because they met on Christmas Eve two years earlier and got engaged on Christmas Eve one year earlier. They go to their wedding venue only to find that the IRS came the night before, shut the business down, and locked all the doors. Beth begs her sister Jessie (Julie Gonzalo) to let them use her back yard for the wedding. They run around town trying to replace everything the can while having Jessie and Pastor Tim (Ryan Rottman) work on getting it all set up. Of course, Tim is Jessie's old high school flame so there's tension in working together. Easily the best of the three films so far as there's nothing as egregiously bad as the adult children in the 1998 part of the first movie or the entire 2003 cast from the second movie.
Saw 3 movies on my flight to London today. 1. The Brutalist [2024] A really really good movie. Brody and Pearce were both fantastic in it. If I didn't know any better, I would have thought this was based on a true story. 2. The Return [2024] I love me some Greek mythology, but this was really underwhelming. Just really nothing much to like about this movie. 3. Goodrich [2024] I really enjoyed this. It has enough of both a good story and humor, on top of excellent Keaton. Charming, sad, and funny at the same time.
Deck the Halls on Cherry Lane - 2024 (Hallmark+) 1966 - Stephanie (Chelsea Hobbs) enters a local radio contest to have a televised Christmas Eve broadcast from her house. The catch is she used the address of her neighbor, David (Benjamin Hollingsworth). To convince him to let her use the house she gets help from her neighbor Amelia (Rrlya McIntosh from the 1951 era of the second film) David's co-worker and housemate Curt (uncredited everywhere I looked) mention how the head of their grant committee is a big fan of the radio host and having the show from his house might influence her decision to extend their deadline. 1981 - This is the same crew from the 1973 portion of the original film and they're excellent once again. John (John Brotherton) and Lizzie (Erin Cahill) actually feel like a real married couple from that era. Greg (Garrett Black) is good again as the family friend and husband of Regina (who we follow with Catherine Bell in the 1998 era). We meet new neighbors Kyle (Jamie M. Callica) and Piper (Lauren Jackson) and then find out how and why John and Lizzie eventually sell the house and move away. 2000 - Recently divorced Rebecca (Brooke D'Orsay) has just moved into 7 Cherry Lane and is celebrating her first Christmas there with her friend Matt (Sam Page). She's a workaholic and he's a comically laid back guy. A random neighbor shovels Rebecca's porch and leaves an unsigned Christmas card at her door. Matt tries to get Rebecca to reach out and meet her neighbors where they discover the same random acts of kindness with the unsigned Christmas cards are happening all over the neighborhood. Brandi Alexander appears as Daisy in the 1981 and 2000 eras and once again Hallmark's makeup department shines as she legitimately looks the right age in both. A couple of asides: Sam Page was actually born Samuel Elliot. He should play Mark Ruffalo's more reserved, laid back brother in something as the resemblance is uncanny and both are from Wisconsin. John Brotherton should play a Bo Duke type of role at some point. He looks and acts like he should have been a TV star in the 70s and early 80s. This was the best of the bunch of the three movies and better than the original. The current list: Hanakkuh on the Rocks Hallmark That Christmas Netflix Believe in Christmas Hallmark Sugarplummed Hallmark Christmas on the Ranch Hulu Christmas on Call Hallmark Following Yonder Star Hallmark Santa Tell Me Hallmark A Reason for the Season Hallmark Mystery Deck the Halls on Cherry Lane Hallmark+ The Finnish Line Hallmark The Merry Gentlemen Netflix Jingle Bell Love Roku Channel Holiday Touchdown: A Chiefs Love Story Hallmark Tis the Season to be Irish Hallmark Happy Holidays from Cherry Lane Hallmark+ A Novel Noel Hallmark Mystery All I Need for Christmas Hallmark Mystery Nutcrackers Hulu A Dance in the Snow Hallmark Mystery Confessions of a Christmas Letter Hallmark Three Wiser Men and a Boy Hallmark Hot Frosty Netflix Unwrapping Christmas: Lily's Destiny Hallmark+ Unwrapping Christmas: Mia's Prince Hallmark+ A Vintage Christmas Great American Family Christmas Under the Lights Hallmark Mystery Twas the Date Before Christmas Hallmark Holiday Mismatch Hallmark The Santa Class Hallmark A '90s Christmas Hallmark The 5-Year Christmas Party Hallmark Trivia at St. Nicks Hallmark Holiday Crashers Hallmark Unwrapping Christmas: Olivia's Reunion Hallmark+ Unwrapping Christmas: Tina's Miracle Hallmark+ To Have and to Holiday Hallmark Operation Nutcracker Hallmark Season's Greetings from Cherry Lane Hallmark+ A Carol for Two Hallmark The Christmas Charade Hallmark Christmas Wreaths & Ribbons Great American Family Trading Up Christmas Hallmark Mystery Jingle Bell Run Hallmark My Sweet Austrian Holiday Hallmark Mystery The Christmas Quest Hallmark Scouting for Christmas Hallmark Our Holiday Story Hallmark Our Little Secret Netflix Christmas with the Singhs Hallmark A Sudden Case of Christmas Hulu This Time Each Year Hallmark Mystery Private Princess Christmas Hallmark Deck the Walls Hallmark Five Gold Rings Hallmark Mystery Meet Me Next Christmas Netflix Debbie Macomber's Joyful Mrs. Miracle Hallmark Leah's Perfect Gift Hallmark Happy Howlidays Hallmark Anything from My Sweet Austrian Holiday and above is watchable. Anything from A Vintage Christmas and above might even be something you really like. 59 Down, 26 to go (I didn't count the excellent Disney+ short film that I watched): Great American Family - 14 Lifetime - 9 UPtv - 3
Predator: Killer of Killers (2025) Dir. Dan Trachtenberg & Joshua Wassung 9th Century Europe. A band of Viking warriors on the war path are hunting for a rival war lord who killed their matriarch's father many years earlier, only for them to grab the attention of a very different type of warrior. 17th Century Japan. In the middle of the denouement of a decades long vendetta between estranged brothers, a Predator inserts himself into their blood feud, looking for a worthy challenger. WWII era Europe. A young pilot becomes convinced that whatever has been decimating their fighter planes aren't in fact enemy squadrons but something else altogether, though he struggles to convince his superiors of this fact. Three different time-lines, three different stories, all with the same basic premise of Human vs. Predator. This is animated feature is co-helmed by Dan Trachtenberg, who co-directed the very enjoyable Predator prequel, Prey. Essentially also a prequel, a trio of vignettes in which a skilled human warrior or warriors has to go up against a Predator. The first hour is very good, with especially the middle section in Japan very well done. The sequence is almost entirely devoid of dialogue and is a masterclass in visual story-telling. And the kid in me would almost argue that Predator vs. Ninja & Samurai is the kind of concept that is enough of an argument in favor of this movie on its own. One small bit of criticism: includes spoilers for the final third of the film (Move your mouse to reveal the content) includes spoilers for the final third of the film (open) includes spoilers for the final third of the film (close) The attempt to connect all three story lines was not bad, but it did feel a bit contrived and forced and thus somewhat inferior to what came before. I mostly liked the animation style, especially in the Japan sequences it popped off the screen.
And Letterboxd tells me this was movie n°50 of the year. A mark I reached on May 3rd last year, so I am slacking!
THE HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER (1990), one of Mrs. W’s favorites. First viewing for me. Pretty damn good. I especially liked Sean Connery snapping the neck of his submarine’s political officer whose name was Putin.
Robocop 2 (1990) As OCP property, the mostly neutered Robocop is one of the few scabs to cross the striking police officer's picket lines. The crime wave is monstrous, made worse by a new drug called Nuke created by a hippie figure. OCP is preparing to bulldoze the city and start fresh, and part of that is making a Robocop 2 (title drop!) - bigger, badder, and with the most unlikely choice of human brain installed in it. Second time watching this, and I can't say anything that could possible improve on my original review: I will say this movie is utterly soulless, cheap, and full of story elements that went nowhere. It is a story created by fascists with that most unfascist of qualities - they just didn't care and half-assed it. But for three seconds it was sublime.
I have long believed that they accidentally touched upon something profound with that montage of failed Robocops, something that on a surface level is even played for darkly comedic laughs, only it lands very differently.
Yeah, they somehow made a commentary on the hubris of mankind thinking they could form an Adam, but better. "Here is not man but New Man, made in the image of our technology to have dominion over flesh." And then it went insane. The stop motion exaggerates that, connecting this movie to other 20th century periods where our optimism was that high.
A Royal/Prince in Paradise - 2023 This movie has too many names. I'm watching it because it's the prequel to the next Christmas movie on my list. Olivia (Rhiannon Fish) is a successful writer of romance novels who is experiencing writer's block. She books an island getaway with her longtime boyfriend Kyle (Juan Fernando Monge) just before he meets her at a coffee shop and breaks up with her. Alexander (Mitchell Bourke) is the Prince of Torovia (or something like that) who is sick of having to keep the schedule his mother, the Queen (Andrea Moor), has laid out for him. He decides to keep a prior engagement for a friend's marine conservation island fundraiser. Olivia bumps into Alexander in a bookshop in Manhattan, because apparently that's in between Torovia and the Haven Islands (that's subtle). Olivia's friend Katie (Cara McCarthy) convinces her that they should take the trip she booked for herself and Kyle. On the island Olivia and Katie run into Alexander and his royal assistant Winston (David Hooley) as well as Kyle and his new girlfriend Tiffany (Naomi Sequeira). Alexander doesn't tell Olivia who he is at first, their time together reignites her writing spark, and the Queen's interference through royal assistant Ridley (Dirk Hunter) helps the manufactured tension. Simple, cheesy, and easily digestible. The nice part of it is the writing isn't bad and the actors are all competent.
Robocop 3 (1993) OCP may have taken absolute control of Detroit following its bankruptcy in Robocop 2, but it has turned into a colossal money pit. Their unlikely savior is the unstoppable juggernaut of Japanese economic power. Now a subsidiary of Kanemitsu Corporation, OCP gets the funds it needs but they have to implement their Delta City project with ruthless efficiency - which means using their private police force to evict everyone from the Cadillac Heights neighborhood and place them in concentration camps within three days. Some of the citizens have formed a revolutionary guerilla force to fight back. And they just got their newest recruit - Robocop (!?). But Murphy isn't the only ロボコップ around. A new Japanese export is coming to kick his ass. This is almost made-for-TV Robocop. Gone is the hyperviolence and any sense of action. Added is a very annoying precocious child. It feels slow and ponderous and padded and artless. While it basically has the same theme as the second movie (the nobility of police vs evil corporations and corrupt government and ineffectual community movements), in all matters of storytelling it is as big a fall from Robocop 2 as Robocop 2 was from the original. The only joke is the utterly embarrassing Robocop v Robocop fight scene. The soundtrack is dreck except for what they steal from the first movie. I did like the streetgang punk trying to figure out how to wear a helmet over his mohawk, so not a total loss.
A Christmas Castle Proposal - 2024 (Great American Family) The sequel to A Royal/Prince in Paradise, this one also inexplicably shows up under multiple names. Winston and Katie are married and on their honeymoon, so they barely appear, with their screen time mostly eaten up by Olivia's parents Madeline (Claire Weller Price) and Henry (Andrew Buchanan). Most of it takes place in the castle is Torovia, making it a real Rhiannon Fish out of water scenario. Simple miscommunications, stunning castle and winter scenes, and a happy ending because why not. It's perfectly solid for what it's trying to be and sets up an obvious third film that will likely be the last one. I wondered how GAF would do with these since they exist solely because Hallmark moved too far left for some of people that were regulars there. Three Christmas movies and one prequel later and nothing has been as good as the upper end of Hallmark but nothing has been near the lower end either.
Just started this on NetFlix...definitely worth a watch: BECOMING LED ZEPPELIN | Full Length Trailer (2025)
Tails of Christmas - 2024 (Great American Family) I'm not even going to bother with the plot. Ash Tsai is okay as the lead. Everyone else is aggressively awful and Eric Guilmette legitimately might be the worst actor I've ever seen. He's worse than Max Covington was in the Hallmark dog movie, and Max was a contest winner who literally had no acting credits before that. This is the first one that I've truly struggled to finish (I'm not actually done, I'm just writing this up so I don't have to watch the movie too closely). Worst of the Christmas movies from last year that I've watched by a wide margin. Not sure why the two worst so far have been based around dogs, but the animals deserve better.
So a few weeks ago my wife and I finished up watching The Office again, and we thought, let's see if John Kasinski is in any other work place comedies. We're in luck! Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan, Season One is not very funny. I mean, sure, when Jack Ryan pranks Sulieman the terrorist by killing his brother, then getting his wife and kids out of Syria and into a safe house in the US, and then finally kills Sulieman... sure, that was mildly amusing. But not anywhere near outright funny.
The Accountant 2 (2025) Dir. Gavin O'Connor Deputy FinCEN director Marybeth Medina gets called in regards to the murder of Ray King, her former mentor and one-time FinCEN director. King was killed at a public venue after meeting with a mysterious woman, who took out several of the killers sent there to take out either King or the woman herself. Medina's only tangible clue is a message written on King's arm that says Find the Accountant. Medina assumes this means the mythical Accountant, Christian Wolff, a man she worked with eight years prior, essentially a genius turned accountant and problem solver for the criminal underworld. Medina shares with him the information of the case the retired King had been working on at the time of his death, a case that seemed to revolve around a small family of illegal immigrants from El Salvador... The critics did not seem to have much love for this. It is indeed another dumb action flick, like the original film. Though how you can be disappointed by this sequel if you saw the original is beyond me. it's essentially largely more of the same, only with much more Jon Bernthal screentime (always a good thing). Perfectly serviceable actioner, fun two hours for the most part. If I have one problem with the screenplay, it is that they don't really do justice to the tragic backstory of one of the antagonists, something that might have been more interesting had it been treated with a bit more regard in the form of screentime, depth, subtlety, ... by the writer and/or director. Instead of the half-finished idea it now presents itself as.
The Amateur (2025) Dir. James Hawes Charlie Heller is a CIA analyst working in the coding and cryptography department at Langley. He is married to a much more outgoing woman, Sarah, who has been trying and failing to get him to come along on one of the many foreign trips she has to make for her job. This time around her job takes her to London for a convention, where she is embroiled in a terrorist incident, in which she is taken hostage by and eventually executed by a four team squad that descended upon the hotel that doubled at the convention venue. The bereaved Charlie is first numb from the pain, then increasingly frustrated by the slow progress from the agency in finding and bringing to justice the men who killed Sarah. When he himself investigates the crime, it does not take him long to identify the four killers, only when he brings the names to his superiors, he realizes they already had this information and for whatever reason are not acting on it. In a desperate ploy, he uses his knowledge of incriminating evidence against a seasoned field agent, O'Brien, to receive the kind of training that would allow him to kill his wife's killers on his own. O'Brien reluctantly agrees, mostly to buy time until they can find whatever hidden stash of files Charlie concealed somewhere. If they find the files or they turn out to not exist at all, they can then eliminate Charlie through some 'accident'. Only before that can happen, Charlie disappears from the training center and re-emerges in Europe, where he starts hunting for the killers... An action thriller with a very familiar plot line. Essentially the bare bones of this same plot were used for the 2017 film American Assassin. Right down to the ornery mentor with the unclear loyalties (played here by Laurence Fishburne and in American Assassin by Michael Keaton). The cast on this thing is kind of insane, besides lead Rami Malek, we have soon to be Lois Lane Rachel Brosnahan, Laurence Fishburne, Holt McCallany, Julianne Nicholson, Michael Stuhlbarg, Caitriona Balfe and even Jon Bernthal (in what is essentially a two-scene cameo). Unfortunately the writing does not really live up to the quality of the cast. Once Charlie lands in Europe, it's a pretty cliché unwinding of the plot, featuring spectacular assassinations in European capitals (Paris, Madrid). I do not know what to make of Rami Malek's movie career, if I am being honest. I loved his supporting work on The Pacific, the first thing I noticed him in. And he was memorably brilliant as the lead on Mr. Robot. Nothing he has done on the big screen since then has measured up to those earlier TV performances, imho. I think part of the problem is the kind of material he chooses.