Different Drummer Belly Dancers

Copshop In a refreshing turn of events, I landed on something in streaming that isn’t too old (is 2021 too old?), and is better than its trailer. But I didn’t see the trailer first, instead I had caught a bit of sequence that made me think the filmmaker has a good handle on suspense, and had hired a believable leading lady to play the rookie cop. This is a similar plot to Last Shift in 2013 and…

Lou I dunno, is this a new obsession for me? Action movies with way too old stars? And in this case starring Allison Janney, who is old and very well known as the queen of sarcasm, not a mean right hook. Mostly I had another session of old movies on the streaming services, except for a couple of horror movies I might have watched if I was alone in the house. But I wasn’t terribly upset because I…

Lucy Worsley Investigates: the American Revolution So, yeah, I’m a massive geek, but you already knew that. I have a favorite historian, and her name is Lucy Worsley. She’s British, so she knows how to present history in a way that engages the learner or casual visitor. American historians are all a bunch of buzz cut white guys with pocket protectors in their white shirt pocket and an unshakable…

Stop! That! Train! This movie gets my enthusiastic vote for Most Obnoxious To Type Title of All Time. Consider, if you will, how often a reviewer has to type the title. Luckily, after today I won’t have to again, I hope. The current film is a very queer pastiche of Airplane, an insane 1980 romp through the sky with “High Adventure”, “Drama”, “Action”, “Romance”, “Music”, and “Dancing”,…

The Thursday Murder Club This is an interesting age for movies, because they’re only a hundred years old, commercially, so there are an increasing number of actors who are aging out of the business. As the industry grows and grows there are more actors than before which equals more old actors than before, leading to more of the Old Actor Movies being made. There is the action packed Expendables…

A House Full of Dynamite The first time I ever watched a thriller about how the United States would react to an end of the world scenario, I was with my dad staring wide eyed at a television that got exactly three channels. One of the reasons The Andromeda Strain worked so well was that the filmmakers captured what people believed about the government’s capabilities; their ability to handle a…

Dust Bunny I am once more having trouble finding something streaming that isn’t five to fifty years old and somewhat interesting. There was one film I almost watched but decided at the last minute I wasn’t in the mood for a comedy. I read the blurb for this film and nearly trotted right past it, but on a whim I watched the trailer and decided it actually looked interesting. Some of you may be…

Thrash I thought I would sample the “creatures who shouldn’t do that” pool again. Instead of the huge alligators of Crawl, which I liked more than expected, I went for an inundated town full of free range sharks. Both feature a hurricane, lots of splashing around in water full of hungry carnivores, and the human chums who welcome them. Mostly, I caught the trailer while sitting in an insomnia…

Ballerina When this film came out I was mildly interested because I had somewhat enjoyed the John Wick universe. Keanu Reeves has long been one of my favorite actors and the action is, while completely predictable, always fun. I’m not unhappy that I waited till this movie was streaming because it was fun on a small screen and that’s all I was looking for. As a side note, the first Lionsgate…

NOTE: For some reason this review decided to hide after a few hours of living on the site. I am publishing it again. If it hides again, then well, I guess Nobody really wants to hide. – CFR Nobody 2 So, I resisted watching this for a while. I saw the first one for some reason I don’t even remember now. The badass hero looks like a knock kneed mailman, and I’m used to guys like Jason Stathan.…

The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare For a classic example of a film with a terribly misleading trailer, look no further. Long, long ago in a movie theater not so far away, CFR and I saw the trailer for this movie and determined to see it. The director has made at least one film that I have enjoyed quite a bit (The Gentlemen) and this looked right up his alley, with lots of shooting and…

The Dinosaurs I was never one of those kids who devoured everything about these creatures. Yes, I grew up in an extreme dinosaur age and family would get me those hard rubber toys, and I was familiar with the more famous ones like tyrannosaur and brontosaur and stegosaur. But I’ve only ever had a passing interest in them for some reason. The science behind them has grown tremendously since I was…

The Pope’s Exorcist Normally I would have passed this movie by, but something drew me to it. I think it was laziness. A long, long time ago, I watched a movie called The Exorcist in the theater with many other shocked people. If you haven’t seen that one in a while, revisit, like I did recently. It’s still shocking, despite the dated look. It will also be scarier than this movie, unfortunately.…

Queens of the Dead The pedigree of this film made me really, really want to see it in the theater last fall, but it never came to my town. I’m not sure I’ll ever really get over that. I paid money online to see it and now I have an earworm (I Got an Axe Wound) and a new top ten favorite of all time zombie film. The maker of this movie, Tina Romero, is the daughter of famed zombie movie creator…

Chernobyl Regular readers know I am a big fan of zombie fiction, but would you believe I was reluctant to watch this “historical re-telling” of the Soviet Union’s nuclear meltdown? The reason is obvious, of course. Zombies aren’t real. Both are huge windows on the state of the world, political and cultural tales relayed through social media that in itself is part of the messaging (how is the…