The Merry Gentlemen (2024)

  I know I said I wasn't going to do another one of these but then my friend was like "Let's do another one!" and I was like "Oh no" and she was like "Oh yeah" and I was like "why did you turn into the Kool-Aid Man and who's going to fix that hole in my wall?"

Ashley (Britt Roberson) was a Broadway dancer in the annual holiday show, Jingle Belles, for 14 years, until she was replaced mid-season by a younger dancer (Bella Shephard).  Lacking other options, Ashley returns to her small home town only to find that her parents' bar, The Rhythm Room, is financially underwater and if they don't get $30,000 by January 1st, it'll get turned into a juice bar.  So Ashley decides to put on an all-male revue, recruiting a hot handyman (Chad Michael Murray), hot bartender (Colt Prattes), hot brother-in-law (Marc Anthony Samuel), hot cab driver (Hector David, Jr.) and hot barfly (Maxwell Caulfield).  She teaches them like six routines in 2 days and turns them loose to rave reviews and an audience of twelve people.  Somehow, they still make money and it seems like all Ashley's plans are working out until she gets a call from her old boss (Meredith Thomas) offering her a raise and her job back if she will ditch that town and do the big Christmas show with the Jingle Belles.

I don't even know where to begin.  This is a movie for people that thought Magic Mike XXL had too much plot and characterization.  It's so two-dimensional it should count as an animated feature.  Nothing in this made sense.  A trope-y script is a given, I understand it's part of the draw of this kind of movie, but even the tropes made no sense.  Nobody fires their headliner without cause midway through a performance season.  But the movie is so committed to Ashley being blameless, because otherwise they'd have to add actual dialogue and humanity to basically a paper doll in a slouchy hat.  Also, everybody's hair is weird and plasticky.  

Clearly, I am not the audience for this.  I hope everyone involved had a very nice time on set and got paid a lot of money.  That's the only reason this should exist.  It's streaming on Netflix.  You can do better.

Rio, I Love You (2014)

  This is the third entry in the Cities of Love series.  It's a little uneven but I expected this.

A series of love stories swirl together in Rio de Janeiro.  A dancer (Rodrigo Santoro) struggles with a potential career change that would take him away from his girlfriend (Bruna Linzmeyer).  A man (Eduardo Sterblitch) tries to understand why his grandmother (Fernanda Montenegro) is living on the streets.  A cab driver (Marcelo Serrado) deals with a jet-lagged actor (Ryan Kwanten).  A sculptor (Vincent Kassel) tries to find inspiration in the sand.  

There were vignettes I liked more than others.  My least favorite was probably the one with John Turturro and Vanessa Paradis but there were enough "good" ones that I still feel really comfortable recommending this. 

It is a tourism pitch, of course, but holy shit is it a good one.  Every aerial shot of the city is stunning.  Gorgeous lighting and composition.  Anthologies are always a mixed bag but if you're in the mood for a whole bunch of different riffs on the concept of love, give it a shot.  It's streaming on Kanopy with a library card. 

The Jazz Singer (1927)

  Content warning:  blackface

Jack Robin (Al Jolson) wants to be a jazz singer but on the eve of his big break on Broadway, he learns that his father (Werner Oland), a cantor, is too sick to perform at synagogue.  Even though Jack has been estranged for many years for not following his father's footsteps, he feels conflicted.  Should he follow his dreams and sing secular music or should he listen to his parents and perform only for God?  

So this is the big one.  The first talking picture.  Without taking away that achievement, which was pretty remarkable, this isn't a particularly good film on its own merits.  The story is lame, the songs are crap, and it hasn't aged well (the minstrel routine he does is full-body cringe).  It's a historical artifact but really not worth watching outside of a film class.  Still, as a film nerd, I felt like I had to so I did.  And now I'm saving you all.  Don't watch this, even though it is on Tubi for free.  Watch Singin' in the Rain instead.  

In other news, I watched the first season of Mob Psycho 100 (the anime, not the live action) on Hulu.  The animation took me a while to get into, it's not a style I like, but I did really enjoy the story and the characters.  If you liked One Punch Man, it's done by the same people.  In fact, there's a cameo early in one of the episodes.  The first season is only 12 episodes so you can knock it out in a day.

Hot Frosty (2024)

  I had a whole post here but Blogger erased it.  Content warning: cancer

Kathy (Lacey Chabert) is not ready to move on yet after the death of her husband, no matter how many gentle hints or how much well-meaning advice she gets from her small-town, nosy-ass neighbors.  Then she wraps a scarf around a weirdly detailed himbo ice sculpture and suddenly she is responsible for a whole new living being.  Jack (Dustin Milligan) has only been alive a couple of minutes but he already knows two things: he loves Kathy and television is the greatest invention.  Things he doesn't understand include public nudity, the melting point of ice, and breaking and entering.  That last one brings him into the crosshairs of the local sheriff (Craig T. Robinson), desperate to be taken seriously.  Kathy has to keep her snowman on ice before the fuzz turns up the heat.

You see what you people have done to me?  This is not my bag at all, and I needed a goddamn Sherpa to help me navigate all the references (hint: if it seems like a weird non-sequitur, it's a reference) to other Netflix holiday movies.  I didn't even know they made that many!

Chabert has made a career of doing these and honestly, good for her.  Milligan I did not recognize but he was in Schitt's Creek and Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency so I have definitely seen him.  It did seem a little like a Brooklyn Nine-Nine skit because of Robinson and Joe Lo Truglio as the cops, but I wasn't mad at it.  It's pretty wholesome.

Anyway, this is a VERY SPECIFIC genre and chances are good, you already know if it's for you or not. If you're familiar with my rants about the Born Sexy Yesterday trope, this is another example.  And no, it is not less creepy if Sexy Baby Brain is a dude.  It's on Netflix.

Downsizing (2017)

  Tyler watched this on the plane back from our trip to Ireland in 2018 and laughed until he made seal noises.  I'm just now getting to it but we very clearly have different ideas of what's funny.

Paul (Matt Damon) is an average guy who just wants to feel like he's helping.  When he hears about a procedure that allows people to shrink to 5" tall, purportedly saving the planet by using a fraction of the resources, he is interested but has a hard time selling the concept to his wife, Audrey (Kristin Wiig), until a consultation shows that their standard of living would also shift and that as Smalls, they could live like millionaires.  He is all set to live in luxury, and then he meets Ngoc Lan Tran (Hong Chau), a Vietnamese dissident and political asylum seeker who was downsized against her will and lost a leg in her escape.

This is a good representation of what it looks like when privileged white people decide to help and get involved when people of color are already doing the work.  Paul means well, he genuinely wants to help, but he doesn't really know how and he's kind of a putz.  The movie is much nicer to Paul than I think is deserved, but I also understand that being mean to people for trying defeats the purpose.

Doesn't matter because the true star of this movie is Hong Chau.  Give her all the roles.  She is great.  Also, Christoph Waltz!  Remember when that dude was in everything?  So good.  

I don't particularly like Alexander Payne.  I think he makes smarmy movies for smarmy, self-indulgent people, but that's me.  Maybe you like this.  Tyler did.  It's currently streaming on Amazon Prime.

Foul Play (1978)

  This features way more Goldie Hawn than it does Chevy Chase.  You can almost pretend he's not in it at all.

An unassuming librarian (Goldie Hawn) looking for love finds herself drawn unwittingly into a complicated assassination plot involving an albino, the Catholic Church, and a man called The Dwarf.  

Man, this movie was a fossil (complimentary).  I wasn't alive in the 70s but watching this made me feel like I was seeing a historical record.  The soundtrack is by Barry Manilow, the hair is big, the cars are bigger, Chevy Chase is supposed to be funny, and everybody smokes.  Wild, lawless times.  

Hawn is effervescent and charming without being a man-crazy ditz.  Burgess Meredith has a supporting role as her neighbor with hidden depths and I could have watched them interact for hours.  Chevy Chase has the charisma of mold but like I said, he's really only in the last third of the movie.  Dudley Moore is one of those build-up characters that doesn't have a pay-off until the final act.  I thought he was just going to be a cameo so I was confused.  

This is not well-represented on streaming sites so you may have to dust off your VPN to find it but it's not terrible for a late-70s screwball comedy.

Wicked: Part One (2024)

  You people have no idea how much I loved the musical Wicked.  It's one of the only things I've seen twice (once in New York and once in D.C.).  I was utterly terrified when they announced a movie adaptation and had resigned myself to waiting until the dust settled before seeing it.  Then I got invited by a friend group to go to the theater and I couldn't say no (I'm the Yes friend).  

Born of a different complexion and possessed of incredible magical talent, Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo) has never fit in but finds herself offered the chance to study with the Grand Sorceress, Madame Morrible (Michelle Yeoh) at university.  This immediately puts her at odds with perky, rich Galinda (Ariana Grande) who craved Morrible's attention for herself.  Unexpected acts of kindness on both sides bring the two girls together but their friendship may not survive Elphaba's growing conviction that the Talking Animals of Oz are being systematically targeted for repression and destruction.  

The stage musical is only two and a half hours long start-to-finish so splitting the movie into two halves feels like a shameless cash grab.  I don't know if they're going to add more info from the book (which is nowhere near as fluffy and fun) or if they're just planning to stretch out the musical's second half the way they did the first.  We'll find out next year, I guess.

Obviously, Erivo and Grande can both sing and act.  I'm not the biggest fan of Grande (there's something really hollow about her that I can't quite put my finger on) but she is perfectly cast.  Jonathan Bailey will be recognizable to the Bridgerton crowd but this was my first exposure.  He plays Hot Himbo very well.  Jeff Goldblum was a surprisingly good singer.  Not sure why I thought he wouldn't be but I was still surprised.  Sadly, Michelle Yeoh is not strong on the one verse Morrible gets but A) she is a divine being and I forgive her anything and B) the role is mostly about acting and she's great at that.  I think I would have been even more lenient if the movie hadn't had Keala "This is Me" Settle in the fucking chorus line.  How are you gonna sideline-- You know, it's too early for my blood pressure to get that high.  We're going to let it go.

Speaking of "Let It Go" there are cameos from the original stars Idina Menzel and Kristen Chenoweth for the die-hards.  I feel like I shouldn't have to say this but it did come up in my screening: there is no post-credit sequence so you can leave whenever you're done.

It's a movie musical about female friendship and political activism with a pink and green color scheme.  You already know if that's going to be your jam or not.  Currently only in theaters.