bkkaz Reviews

Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers (1988)

Intensely Bad

[2/10 · 12 October 2023]

The only redeeming quality is Donald Pleasence -- tired and wheezy as he is -- shows up. But this is dreadfully bad movie. The little girl is terrible. Her mugging and stilted delivery make Dakota Fanning look like Meryl Streep. The babysitting stepsister seems to have gone to the same acting school of gaping as the girl in Jurassic Park.

But, really, these dime-a-dozen slasher movies don't exist for the acting. Once in a while, something as good as the original Halloween comes along (though the supporting cast is often just passable there, too), but audiences for this stuff aren't watching for the performances.

So that means the rest has to be good. And it isn't. This was made by a director who doesn't seem to understand much about, oh, camera set ups and blocking the actors, nor an editor who understands anything about pacing. Thus, some scenes will flash by in a moment, before you brain has a chance to figure out what happened, while others will drag on interminably, like the slowest escape from a masked killer in a house in the history of movies.

Sadly, they made yet another one with the cast after this.

Halloween (2007)

Torture Porn Trash

[2/10 · 11 October 2023]

The original Halloween was a low-budget thriller that recognized there was a time and place for the violence and that less is more. This version of Halloween has no sense of such things, instead believing that violence, grim and unrelenting, is all that it takes. Torture porn. The laughable attempts at character building do little except establish a white trash world where sadism is the norm and all the authority figures -- psychiatrists, school principals, mother and father figures -- are so corrupted, their only interest is themselves.

By comparison, Michael Myers seems almost normal, but that's like saying Stalin by comparison to Hitler seems almost normal. The deck is stacked way too much in favor of any ugly world in which only ugliness can flourish. So when you watch Halloween -- unless you get off on the ugliness and brutality -- you have nothing to root for and, therefore, nothing to care about. Michael Myers isn't Frankenstein's monster. In this movie, he's barely Michael Myers.

Instead, he's merely an excuse for the carnage. Even Sam Loomis is a shell of the character in the first movie, a venal, twitchy, and ultimately ineffective twerp of a man. Casting Malcolm McDowell in the role didn't help, though given he once played H. G. Wells with a high degree of sympathy, it's sad he musters nothing here.

This version of Halloween more or less follows the same plot as the original, only there are more victims and a lot more blood. The dialogue is often inane, and the scenes come across more like hard rock music videos with no sense of anything but the moment. In fact, you could watch each scene separately and never feel like the lack of something resembling a story matters. Laurie Strode is a whiny know-it-all Millennial, so you'll be rooting for Michael Myers.

Hollow Man (2000)

Everybody is a Jerk in this Movie

[3/10 · 9 September 2023]

Coming off the 1980s and 1990s, it's not surprising that movies would feature egomaniacal, self-centered people as main characters and nobody would think twice at how abnormal that is. I mean, these are all privileged White jerks whose smugness is outmatched only by their stark pallor and washed-out eyes and hair. Worse, this is a movie that routinely shows animal abuse in one form or another, and since it's based on scientific research, that's not surprising.

Kevin Bacon, who always looks like a ventriloquist's doll with its head smashed together, plays an obvious narcissist working with a team of self-assured nitwits to discover the means to make living creatures invisible. Yes, this is an update of The Invisible Man, but while that novel and the various films of it have stood as cautionary tales, this one is just grim and violent -- needlessly so. The scene where an invisible dog is beaten to death, for example, is not just gratuitous. It's psychotic.

It's a Paul Verhoeven film, meaning made by a director who loves his violence. Robocop and Total Recall, for instance, are way over the top, and yet because of their cartoonish nature, they don't seem quite as perverse as this film. Yes, the characters are all cartoonish, but the attempts to sicken us with the violence are not.

But, wait -- these scientists kill miss and lab animals every day, how is that any different? Blah, blah, blah. If you don't get that this is a cheesy B movie made for entertainment that nonetheless plumbs depths it doesn't need to in order to be a thriller, then there's no explaining to you. After you, with that kind of reasoning, you probably think swatting a mosquito that's biting you is the same thing as pulling the wings off a fly and watching it die agonizingly.

You'll noticed I'm spending a lot of time are the pornographic violence of this movie. That's because there's not much story beyond the expected and no one to care about. I'm not joking when I say I couldn't care less about any of the people here, included Elizabeth Sue, who constantly has an expression like she can't remember where she left her keys. That's for more than two hours. At the end, I was hoping none of them would make it, even if I was rooting for someone to open the animal cages and set them free. By the way, most of the animals are CGI creations, which means I was further rooting for animals that didn't even exist onscreen.

Yeah, the special effects here are pretty good, and yeah, this s a competently filmed movie. So what? That's like a really nicely composed photo of a garbage can.

So, to recap, this was an awful movie from an awful time. It's not a mistake that the only one of the cast to have really gone much anywhere after is Josh Brolin, but that seems more an accident. Kevin Bacon is probably sitting on some really tall and long-faced ventriloquist's lap.

Life (I) (2017)

Unremarkable and Kind of Dumb

[5/10 · 3 September 2023]

Okay, so we're used to Hollywood recycling all the same basic stories into some newer and usual inferior version. With sci fi, whether that's horror or space opera, it's with more special effects. Life is one of those movies. While nothing truly special, the effects in this movie do try to take us to a different reality by making just about every scene in a weightless environment. We've seen that before but not quite to this degree.

Too bad it's wasted on a typical puerile story, with little suspense and cardboard characters. This is one of those movies where the actors have to simultaneously look drugged -- as though they feel no real emotions -- while also acting in frenetic ways -- because, you know, the action comes at us 100 MPH.

Now, the characters here are all the stock types. We have the stalwart commander, the sensible junior officer, the scientist who goes too far, and the various cannon fodder for the creature that, of course, will stalk them all. You've seen this story a million times, and with smarter people. In fact, these are among the dumbest scientists presented in this sort of film, even though ostensibly, they should all have graduate degrees.

Their first mistake is taking what appears to be a single-celled organism from Mars and messing around with it about the International Space Station. You'd think NASA, at the very least, would have protocols for such, but these folks behave more like camp counselors in one of those ski mask killer movies. Oh, there's a protocol in case something gets out but apparently anyone can just mess around with new life however they want in the meantime.

In some ways, the movie want to be The Andromeda Strain, but that movie was smart, told in a semi-documentary style. This movie is like a videogame, with little time to think (even though some scenes drag the action out while the crew seems to react in slow motion). If that's your thing, you'll be amazed by this movie. If you're someone easily impressed who scoffs with the usual tripe of "Huh, huh, huh, it's only a movie, man," then you're actually on to something but for the wrong reasons. Yes, it's only a movie. That's all it is.

The Faculty (1998)

Haha, What Utter Dreck, Though Bebe Neuwirth is Hot

[2/10 · 18 August 2023]

It's so funny these days how people think ripping off other things is somehow "hip" or "meta." No, it's just ripping off. Even though The Faculty was made in the 90s -- a decade that closely followed the 80s in producing a lot of garbage -- it's particularly bad.

This is one of those movies with a collection of cliches and stock characters -- the jocks, the socials, the nerds, the minorities, etc. -- and even though it is set in the abysmal state of Ohio, not even that awful place is this whitebread.

You've seen this story a bizillion times before, from TV's The Outer Limits to Heinlein's The Puppet Masters to Invasion of the Body Snatchers to episodes of Star Trek. Humans are taken over by parasitical aliens who steer them around like fleshly motorcars, all as part of some invasion that doesn't quite make sense. There's a cast of familiar 90s faces, most of them B movie actors and has-beens, along with a collection of teen types, from the goony and somnambulant Josh Harnett (who should get the Kevin Costner award for bland acting) to shrunken, bug-eyed Elijah Wood to all-jaw, no forehead Clea Duvall to lemonhead, no talent Usher.

What ensues is the usual nonsense where the teens have to battle the invasion while the adults are incapable or unconcerned -- you know, like in The Blob.

No, this is not hip. It's annoying. No, this is not smart. It's smug. No, this is not fun. It's frenetic. It's just a dumb movie, but if that's all you're looking for, you'll probably like it way more than it deserves.

Law & Order: Armed Forces (2001) Season 12, Episode 2

Infuriating in Many, Many Ways

[5/10 · 9 August 2023]

So, the Law and Order franchise does not have a good track record portraying Asian victims. Perhaps this is reflective of the NYC or the people making the show, but in addition to having no major Asian characters -- in a city with 1.2 million Asian Americans! -- it often treats Asian characters as meek, foreign, or malevolent. You know, all the standard stereotypes that have been around for at least 100 years in American popular entertainment.

This episode is more or less an adaption of the My Lai massacre, where a group of mostly White American soldiers slaughtered men, women, and children in a village. It wasn't the only such war crime in Vietnam, but it was the one that got headlines. Eventually, nothing really happened to any of the soldiers who were tried, and the obvious racial angles of a group of Whites slaughtering Asians was, as usual, dismissed as just the tragedy of war.

This episode follows a similar perspective -- at the end, we even have a self-righteous homily by McCoy about how these were just kids. Yeah. This is the same McCoy who prosecuted kids as adults. Unlike the superior Michael Moriarty character, Ben Stone, McCoy was constantly waffling on his principles. This week, he might -- Alan Alda style -- pontificate about a particular social cause he favors. Next week, he might take exactly the opposite stance. Binge watch Law and Order, and the inconsistency becomes far more obvious.

There are other moments, too. They end up dragging some poor elderly Vietnamese woman over the NYC, only to throw out her testimony because she apparently didn't directly witness anything. What? No one interviewed her beforehand? And everyone talks about her like she's an object rather than a person, their tone either condescending (the blond defense attorney) or matter of fact (McCoy, who seems indifferent to his own witness). Just unsavory.

In the end, there's a cavalry-over-the-hill arrival that saves the case, but even then, the two accused men -- privileged White men -- are more disgusted that they were accused than that they murdered people. Yes, this may be accurate to reality, but the episode offers little in the way of condemnation for it, with McCoy's idiotic epiphany at the end especially insulting. Not Law and Order's finest hour.

Law & Order: Blue Bamboo (1994) Season 5, Episode 3

Brilliant Episode about Racism and Ethnocentrism That Just Stops Short

[9/10 · 7 July 2023]

It's interesting to go back and watch Law and Order in the 1990s and early 2000s. Clearly, they're willing to take more risks, including with offending their target audience (which, presumably, was meant to be people intelligent enough to think through the ideas rather than simply react emotionally).

In this episode, a blond White woman claims she was abused in Japan. While the episode traffics in stereotypes -- we're reminded that women "walk behind their husbands" in Japan when that is certainly not universally true or that Japanese men are "intimidated" by western women as though Asian men are somehow inferior -- it does get to the heart of American prejudices. When that blond White women murders a seemingly random Japanese man -- after letting herself be picked up in a hotel bar and even voluntarily going back to the room of the Japanese man -- we're to believe racism isn't at work but merely a form of "battered wife" syndrome. She could have walked away. And she has a library of books about battered women syndrome.

From there, it becomes who will the almost entirely White jury, defense, and prosecution sympathize with. Kudos to the writers and producers for having the courage to be honest with how things work in our justice system with the ending. Yes, the ending is infuriating, but it will remind us of closet bigotry.

Where the episode stops short, though, is in fully addressing race as an issue. By constantly reminding us her issue is with Japanese men only, it ignores the reality that then and now, most westerners don't see a distinction among the various Asian cultures and nationalities. This is why keeps the episode from having the full courage to be truthful.

Laura Linney is perfectly cast. Her flat, shrill, monotone presence is exactly what the character calls for, and if so many in the audience don't see any of those negative qualities, it just proves the point the episode makes about how something else is clouding their judgment.. But the lack of an Asian American regular characters on Law and Order -- then and now -- is even more apparent here. It's sad and amusing to see people constantly talking about Asians who aren't Asian themselves. Kind of takes the issue of prejudice to a meta level.

Endeavour: Exeunt (2023) Season 9, Episode 3

Sentimentality Aside, the Episode Falters

[7/10 · 3 July 2023]

Okay, "Exeunt" drips with sentimentality, especially in the last five minutes or so. People clutching their hankies are going to love it. But is it a payoff for both nine seasons of Endeavour and as a lead in to the Inspector Morse series from 25 years ago?

Not exactly. This episode rushes to tie up some loose ends, and in some ways, does so. But the biggest one -- the love affair that never happened between Joan Thursday and Morse -- is bungled. (Though, honestly, if there was ever a real match for Morse in Endeavour, it was Trewlove.)

For several seasons, it was clear Joan had issues. At the very least, she was emotionally disturbed, but maybe it was full blown mental illness. She fights with her father, flirts with Morse, and then runs off to have love affairs, including with a much older guy who puts a roof over her head and not much more. The series seems to treat this merely as some kind of phase she's going through when her problems -- and the troubled way the actress seems to project while having them -- portend much more.

Yet, by the end of Endeavour, she now seems to be the stable one while Morse -- steady and steadfast for much of the series -- will end up being the lonely alcoholic. It doesn't jibe.

What would have made more sense would be for Morse to fall for her, for them to try a tumultuous relationship, and for him to come to terms with the reality that he can't fix her because love isn't enough. That would be enough to drive any man to drink.

Moreover, that she marries the oafish, social-climbing dullard who will eventually become Morse's boss also makes no sense. Not only is Joan never mentioned in Inspector Morse, he doesn't even like Strange's never seen wife, which is hardly the attitude expressed in this episode.

Now, I know what you're thinking. Something happens to Joan -- maybe even a similar scenario to what I described -- and he remarries. The problem is we're unlikely to ever see another Morse TV show, since author Colin Dexter said he would not provide the rights to such. Perhaps there's a loophole where they can do another Endeavour season to clear this up, but it's doubtful.

So, what we're left with is one of several holes in the Morse biography, not to mention trying to reconcile how the restless, introspective character known as Endeavour becomes the cranky, prematurely aged alcoholic called Morse.

The rest of the episode is uneven, with a middling mystery but some nice character moments. The bit with Fred Thursday is . . . Convenient. It's not exactly unbelievable, but at the same time, for it to happen in the final episode just smacks of too much plotting and not enough story. But there is a nice bit with Mr. Bright at the end that gives both him and the episode more poignance, as well as two cars not quite passing in the night.

King Rat (1965)

Dreary, Hopeless Talky British Drama

[5/10 · 30 May 2023]

Let's face it: The British like to talk. Nine times out of 10, that's what their movies are. For a such stodgy group, they sure talk a lot in their movies.

This one concerns a prison camp full of British twits being manipulated by an American psychopath. This is a movie where people operated under the pretense of civilization but act more like animals that walk upright. In this, the movie is accurate about the Europeans and their colonials, ready to turn on each other in an instant. The Japanese, of course, are presented as fanatical inferiors, even though they allow the prisoners a degree of freedom they don't deserve.

It's clear from the movie that this is meant to be some kind of deep introspection about the human spirit. But that's too pat. We don't see all of humanity here but a desperate group of men, some White, some Asian, stuck in the jungle in a situation that doesn't make much sense otherwise.

The cast is good. Lots of recognizable faces from the era, including James Donald, who seems to be playing the same part here as he did in the much better The Bridge on the River Kwai.

George Segal is appropriately slimy as the cold and calculating businessman, the titular King Rat. Tom Courtenay plays a fine uptight jerk of a lieutenant, holding to rules that make little sense in a place where nothing except survival makes sense. John Mills plays the part Trevor Howard would have in another movie. Patrick O'Neal shows some range, and James Fox looks like the prototype for David Bowie's similar turn in Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence.

Jurassic World (2015)

Like the Alien Movie -- How Many Times Can You Tell the Same Story?

[5/10 · 28 May 2023]

Hollywood is particularly cynical and has been for a long time. They figure if they reheat the same leftovers, people will show up again and again. The sad thing is they're mostly right, at least with the simple minded among us.

You've seen everything in Jurassic World before, only better. And while this film is miles ahead of the weird, unhappy one after, it's miles behind the first one. Chris Hemsworth or Pratt or whatever his name is is every generic Hallmark movie type you've seen before. His character is all action, little brains, but in a movie this dumb, that still makes him the smartest character onscreen. He's joined by Ron Howard's daughter -- you know, a nepo baby -- as the manly PR person with the big caboose. They're like an over-the-hill prom couple, so nauseating together you'd think you really were watching a Hallmark movie.

What else is there to say? It's the same plot as the last three, which is to say the humans think they're in control and the dinosaurs still manage to get free and wreak havoc. There's nothing in here that is remotely fresh, with the possible exception of some particular cruelty to an office drone who, while annoying, still doesn't deserve her fate. The director, Colon Trevennanananaeasoh seems to delight in how she gets dispatched.

There's a couple of annoying kids, too, but then all of these movies have that. The movie also walks a line between being a "serious" monster movie and camp, such as when we see the fullback Howard run down a puddle-strewn alley in her heels.

The usual special effects are here, but somehow not particularly special. There are few scares but the movie pretends like it has more. I'd hoped after this one they'd make no more -- I mean, why ruin the legacy of what was one pretty good movie, one so-so movie, and one underwhelming movie? But, no, they just had to do another one and then one more. I guess if the only thing on the menu is franks and beans, that's what people are going to buy.

Law & Order: Collision (2000) Season 10, Episode 11

Heartbreaking Episode Back When Law and Order was Topnotch

[9/10 · 26 May 2023]

A mentally ill homeless woman is found dead, and all signs point to a mentally ill homeless man as the culprit. The case seems like a slam dunk, but accused refuses to take his medication, which then leads to a conundrum. How can he participate in his own defense if he is not functioning with enough mental acuity to be considered competent?

Of course, as the police and legal team dig deeper, they discover not all is what it seems.

This is one of many episodes that remind us Jack McCoy is a particularly nasty piece of work. There's a lot of public-facing performative rhetoric from him, as though he's still fighting the good fight from the 1960s, but if you binge Law and Order, you'll see he's particularly hard on People of Color and the mentally ill. Episodes that feature one or the other always have those moments where McCoy acknowledge that society treats both poorly and unequally, and yet this seems only to serve paradoxically as a rationale for McCoy to be even harsher on them. His logic seems to be he can never let sentiment or good works occupy a space higher than the law. Never mind that in the next episode he will, oh, take on the gun lobby for promoting bump stocks or something, arguing that new law must be created to deal with an evolving threat.

That's the only reason this episode doesn't get a 10. At the end, when justice is meted out, it doesn't seem so just, especially when we've seen McCoy go easier in situations where he is personally moved. The character was always written to be something of a privileged, self-righteous jerk, but there's a lot of inconsistency to his moral boundaries. And that's not including his predilection toward making his subordinates sleep with him.

Hoosiers (1986)

Almost as Idiotic as Real Basketball

[3/10 · 20 May 2023]

Hoosiers is dumb, but accurate. If you've ever had the misfortune of spending any time in the Midwest, you know it's a desolate land of corn and cornpone. Hoosiers captures that pretty accurately, hence 3 stars. And since it was made in the 1980s, they searched high and low for a story without any minority characters in the foreground.

But the rest is just a shallow redux of Rocky or any number of other sports films about the plucky underdog who has to find the huckleberry gumption to do something really important in life . . . Like win a high school basketball championship.

Yes, this is a town of homely Al Bundy's with bad haircuts and houses with silos built next to them. Only it features a weird 80s synthesizer and orchestral soundtrack that immediately takes you out of the 1950s era it's supposed to be set in.

Gene Hackman does his usual Gene Hackman performance, and Dennis Hopper does his usual Dennis Hopper performance, except with a weird hill jack haircut.

There are no surprises in Hoosiers, and, thus, no real drama. You know how it's going to turn out, and all the melodramatic manipulations won't change anything. If you get the impression people in Indiana don't have much to live for except high school athletics and, maybe, going through the motions of evangelical religion (when they're not mouthing off or sundowning minorities, it seems), then this movie will just affirm your opinion. As a period piece, it more or less looks like what photos from the era suggest. Bad hair, poorly fitting suits, people who look one part mean and one part depressed. The ending where they beat a team of -- gasp! -- Black players represents their greatest fears because, you know. I wish I was making this up, but it was the 80s.

Law & Order: Open Wounds (2023) Season 22, Episode 22

A Little Better in the First Half, But, Man, Does Melodramatic Music Have to Underscore Everything?

[3/10 · 19 May 2023]

Some senator is murdered, so the Law and Order team -- despite having assured a civilian several episodes ago they treat all cases the same -- launch into this one with the fervor of a Doberman on a hot dog.

Soon, they discover a bald white guy is the prime suspect. Of course, he acts like he's dislocated from reality, so you know he's up to something. And he's nebbish-y, so he's either a teacher or a librarian. Derp derps, but Lurch has a moment where his acting rises above lumbering to try to show some compassion toward the guy.

But is that compassion misplaced?

Sam the Eagle comes out of his doorway to show up at a news conference. He doesn't unfold his arms, though. Now, Sam has always been kind of shaky. I wondered many years ago if he had Parkinson's because he shook his head so frequently when speaking. So, when he clasps his arms together so much now, I wondered if he does have the illness and is trying not to show it. I looked it up and saw that he does, so I'm going to just say now I understand why they don't put him under as much stress and strain and will be tempering any reviews accordingly. He's a champ for being willing to do his part in the reboot. I just wish they wrote his character better, like in the old days.

He does have to work with his daughter. The actress they chose is okay -- she actually is Waterston's daughter, Elisabeth -- but as with the actor they chose for Ben Stone's son, dry and bland. It would have been better had they gotten Waterston's other daughter, Katherine, to play the part. She's got more range and presence. If you're going to be a nepo baby, it would be nice if you also had talent.

The episode takes a kooky left turn into the land of PTSD. It turns out the shooter is a school shooting survivor, so his alleged motive for killing the senator -- who was a rabid and unapologetic tool for the gun lobby -- is tied to his mental illness.

There's a gratuitous scene where the Garden Gnome holds up a bloody wedding dress that looks soaked. The awful melodramatic music intrudes, as do so many melodramatic gasps from the court audience. Really, they're not taking any chances the audience who tunes in won't somehow realize the horror of what they're seeing without underscoring it with such camp.

Lots of weird legal illogic, too. McCoy's daughter goes around the ADA -- who should probably recuse himself because he's suffering from PTSD and it's clouding his legal judgment -- to bargain directly with her father, trying to use emotional blackmail to get him to see her client in a different way. At the very least, the NYC DA should be aware of the optics of all that, not to mention if the media learns of it. But in this incarnation of Law and Order, pesky realities like that don't get addressed so, instead, it's about the soap opera melodramatics of events. How L&O has so declined.

Law & Order: Promote This! (2009) Season 19, Episode 18

One of the Better Later Law and Order Episodes Except They Play It Safe

[9/10 · 17 May 2023]

This is one of the better Law and Order episodes -- keep in mind, this was 2009, before America started to pay more attention to racial crimes against people based on their race.

Hispanic men are being targeted for random, race-based attacks until inevitably, one is left beaten and brain dead. The case leads to a group of White teens who for kicks and in the shadow of their parents' venal racism decide to take out their kicks on "illegals" -- including one victim born and raised in Michigan.

It's a scenario that plays out over and over again, more recently with the uptick in violence against Asian Americans.

In particular, the actress playing the mother of the victim is incredible. She conveys the pain and horror of a poor woman who raised her son right and loves him with all her heart, only to have him taken away by evildoers raised by animals with money.

But there are two offensive parts. 1) At the end, after the mother of one of the innocent victims who is only being kept alive by life support signs a DNR, Sam the Eagle observes coldly, "Everyone games the system." Really? Sometimes, Sam the Eagle is presented as a smarmy Hawkeye-Pierce-like liberal, but then others, he's just cold, especially to minorities, as though he's got some serious bigotry issues of his own. 2) They had to include a Hispanic person among those who attacked the Hispanic victims. Seriously, that just chickens out of dealing with the cold reality of who frequently and routinely commits race-based hate crimes.

The Duellists (1977)

Long, Droning Movie About Long, Droning Characters

[2/10 · 14 May 2023]

The many, many wars in Europe suggest the people they enjoy killing. It seems the continental past time. Was there every a period of sustained peace? The history certainly doesn't suggest so. So, when they're not fooling around on their wives -- who always seem to utterly clueless and therefore pathetic -- they're killing each other or someone else.

That's basically the premise here. Two grown men spending a significant portion of their adult lives trying to kill each other. People watch. People help. But if you're waiting for some kind of growth or self awareness, you won't find it here.

Because it's paced so slowly and filmed like a Kubick movie, it's supposed to be poignant. It's not. It's just a story that takes place over many years about two knuckleheads whose mentalities are too small to figure out anything better to do.

And they're supposed to be French but speak in British or American accidents. I'd say that says something, too, but it would be lost on too many people.

Just tedious with some costumes and scenery.

Law & Order: Appraisal (2023) Season 22, Episode 21

It's Not Very Good

[1/10 · 13 May 2023]

Reviews constantly get rejected, but there's no rationale given for why. So, perhaps one must play it conservatively.

I'll just say this episode was not very good. It just wasn't very good. I was hoping it would be better - at least be kinda good -- but it just wasn't. It just wasn't very good.

Now, to be good, it would have to be better but, unfortunately, it wasn't

The police weren't very good.

The ADAs weren't very good.

There was a mystery here that wasn't very good. I was thinking, if this was good, it would be better. But it just wasn't.

Law and Order used to be very, very good. Now, it's just not very good anymore.

Law & Order: Patriot (2002) Season 12, Episode 24

Pretty Strong Episode

[9/10 · 8 May 2023]

Patriot comes late in the original run of Law and Order, when the debates about social issues and current events began to tip toward being pedantic rather than dramatic. Here is a question that resonated then and resonates now: If the enemy is terrorists who doesn't represent a traditional military, how do you stop them?

Now, keep in mind that the FBI -- then and now -- have warned the U. S. has more to fear from domestic terrorists -- hate groups and so-called militias, for example -- than from foreign terrorists. And members of those groups have infiltrated both the police and military that this episode sees as the defenders of our freedom.

Law and Order would on occasion tackle those kinds of terrorists, too.

In this episode is the age-old suspicion of the other, the immigrant, the face not like our own. America has always struggled with this issue, and this time, it's anyone who looks "Middle Eastern" who is the target.

As you might expect, a group of self-appointed patriots, some military veterans, decide to strike first when they discover someone from Yemen who they believe is cooking up some kind of attack. He has tens of thousands of dollars in his bank account, and somehow circumstantially this all makes him fit the profile of a terrorist. When he turns up murdered, it's now up to Sam the Eagle and crew to put them behind bars.

But is the case so cut and dry?

The acting here is top notch, of course. Even some actors, like Tony Serpico, who turn up later in the maudlin SVU, is still giving natural performances that so shine brighter than soap opera antics of the other series. But special attention should be given to Leo Burmester, whose defense attorney, Hastings, is exactly the sort of southern fried butterball who talks out of both sides of his mouth without hesitation. You hate him for what he does rather than the mustache twirling silliness of more contemporary foils in the Law and Order franchise.

I won't reveal too much about the ending. It may or may not move you, as it may seem where things are obviously headed, but it speaks to both our paranoia and the notion of privilege over whose fears are allowed to culminate in violence.

Silverado (1985)

A Long, Repetitive Whitefest

[5/10 · 6 May 2023]

It was the 80s. Reagan tried to remake America as the 1950s, and you know what that meant. Whitefest.

Yes, Danny Glover and Lynn Whitfield are in this movie, but their parts could have been played by anybody. For that matter, so could the cowboys and sheriff, who are all cliches. But, no. It was the 1980s. Whitefest.

There's a reason this decade is so near and dear to the hearts of so many who grew up in it. I'll give you a clue: It's one word.

As far as westerns go, this one recycles everything you've seen before, and in doing so, goes on about 30 minutes too long. At some point, even the gunfights become tedious because they're just a slight different version of what you saw 10 minutes ago. That's hard to do. Even in the John Wayne movies this one tries most to emulate, there's interest. There's build up. Here, it's just one flat sequence of events.

The music is good, so there's that. It's kind of James Horner meets Elmer Bernstein. The direction is good in the sense of having scope. The acting ranges from passable to interesting. But the script needed to cut out the fat. There's a lot of padding here.

I won't go into much detail with the story, not just because it's full of tropes you already know but because it's so thin that talking too much about it leaves little to watch. Let's just say there's a big bad sheriff in a no account town who crosses paths with a disparate group of individualists who have to come together as a force to stop him. Oh, and the sheriff works for an evil landowner.

So, you've seen it before.

In the meantime, heroes are made in the mold of the 1980s.

If that kind of thing gets your motor running, this movie is for you. If you find yourself saying, what, again, well there are movies with both better scripts and more diversity out there. You just have to find them, even in the 2020s.

Law & Order: Double Down (1997) Season 7, Episode 19

Back When Law and Order was Good

[9/10 · 6 May 2023]

The Law and Order franchise could be uneven, but until the reboot, it never dipped below "good." That's remarkable for a TV series let alone one that ran this long. Most of the episodes are excellent or very good. This is one that is very, very good.

It manages to probe the notion of the law being manipulated by the criminals and then being manipulated the DA to get the criminals. There are, of course, the moral shades of gray inherent in such legal maneuvering.

You can't feel sorry for the criminal, and not just because he's a vile murderer. He's got one of those unlikable, squnity faces. He looks like an older version of Timmy, from the Seinfeld episode where George double dips. I remember the actor from way back in the original Equalizer series -- I'm pretty sure this guy shows up in the montage of the opening credits in the phone booth. He played a wormy husband who's wife steps out on him with, unbeknownst to her, a hired killer. Here, he's the killer.

He thinks he gets one over on McCoy, only for McCoy to turn the tables. The dialogue and performances are all top notch -- you not only understand the legal stakes, but the drama of the moral issue is handled well, too. Well, for the most part.

The one character in this era to the series who was often inconsistent was Ray. Though this was before the term got well known, he often seems to be virtue signaling in his opposition to what either his partner or McCoy are up to. Sometimes Ray is right in that the moral issue outweighs the legal one. Here, though, he just comes across as a self-righteous jerk. When McCoy tells him to stop talking n court but he keeps going anyway it's like a spoiled kid trying to push the adult too far. It wasn't even necessary because the objection could have been made elsewhere.

There's a difference between a Boy Scout and a little smart aleck.

Other than that, the episode is taut and well done -- miles and miles ahead of the dreck that is the reboot.

Law & Order: Special Victims Unit: Bend the Law (2023) Season 24, Episode 19

Awful Even by SVU Standards

[2/10 · 28 April 2023]

So . . . SVU goes on yet another male bashing tirade.

Case in point. The really bland DA chooses to hide something - *she* chooses - and then says it was so she wouldn't *emasculate* - notice, they could just as easily have chosen a neutral term, like humiliate - her wormy husband. So, he's to blame for *her* decision.

Let's turn that around.

If he had been the DA and his wife had done something wrong - and he chooses to do something illegal and further chooses to characterize his decision in a way that is sexist toward his wife, as though she is to blame - we not only would be justifiably outraged at *him*, we'd also say the decision was solely his to own.

This is what viewers mean when they are offended by something that rather than simply tell a story, instead subjects them to an editorial disguised as one. There's nothing wrong with telling a story about a woman wronged by a man, but when the deck is stacked this cheesily, it's clumsy and amateurish.

Drama - even bad melodrama like SVU - doesn't come from stacking the deck so obviously. It comes from conflict, including creating conflict in the audience about what's happening in the story (and not how bad the writing is).

If they're on their feet and clapping at the TV while saying, "You go, girl!" that's not conflict. That's propaganda.

Real conflict is a wife struggling over doing her job and hurting her husband. It doesn't make her husband a two-bit creep so she can pontificate to him while he worms his way around. It doesn't make her spout of trite dialogue written as though for a Cosmopolitan article. And it makes her take ownership of her own decisions and not gaslight them onto someone else.

The end is like science fiction. Remember when characters used to do things within the realm of probability? That's all off the table now, where characters are written like they're in soap opera.

Just bad, bad television.

Law & Order: Private Lives (2023) Season 22, Episode 19

Another SVU Masquerading as Law and Order

[2/10 · 28 April 2023]

So . . . Yet another SVU storyline reheated for Law and Order. In this case, a transgender issue.

Now, understand the distinction. There's absolutely nothing inherently SVU about having a transgender character. That's certainly possible in any iteration of Law and Order.

But this is an episode where being transgender is integral to the nature of the crime. That is SVU territory. And all the didactic speeches characters give about what being transgender is, the debates over it, and so on - that's much like the preachy, virtue signaling "we're here to teach you a lesson" approach of SVU.

The rest of the dialogue follows suit like you'd expect, which is to say, like some writers looked at a Wikipedia entry on being transgender and said, how can they work the seminal issues into dialogue that sounds phony as real speech?

The weirdest part about all this is the Garden Gnome is the one troubled by young people making the decision. If there was one character on the show who I'd think had that debate when they were young, it would be the Garden Gnome.

If someone was going to get all frosty about it, I'd expect it to be Derp, though with each episode, they seem to be unconcerned anymore about how the characters were originally established.

Remember, Derp was the cro-magnon who had a lot of bigoted views.

Anyway, the rest is the usual. The too-severe computer tech is too severe, Lurch lurches, Manhands handles the men, AOC is reduced to a cameo, etc.

If Sam, the Eagle, was in there, I missed it, but then I got up to do something interesting for a few moments.

Billions (2016–2023)

Should Have Been Called "Garbage"

[1/10 · 22 April 2023]

There are tons of shows like these on cable and streaming right now. They all have exactly the same formula: 95% of the characters are White, there's a few minorities to deflect accusations of racism, and everyone does bad things to everyone else, so they're all amoral. Throw in some aimless sexual spectacle and occasional violence. They cuss all the time for no particular reason, to the point it becomes not just a distraction but a reminder that you're watching a TV show. A bad TV show.

Who is making all these shows? Is it the same handful of people in some hotel room somewhere, banging out treatment after treatment but just changing the names and locales?

One episode of this tripe was enough. Boring actors, cardboard characters, hackneyed dialogue, silly, silly plots, You don't get the hour you waste on this garbage back, so choose your viewing carefully.

Firecreek (1968)

Mind Numbing Western About a Bunch of Losers

[3/10 · 22 April 2023]

Boy, they just don't stop talking in Firecreek. Jimmy Steewart, Henry Fonda, Dean Jagger -- they give so many speeches, you'd think they were running for political office.

This is a dumb western. And that's hard to accomplish given the westerns don't have to be all that bright to begin with. They're stories about dusty cornpone types who say little and think less, most trying to figure out why they wanted to farm in the desert or how they're going to make a living without doing something terrible to the Native Americans. They ride horses. They pick their teeth. You can smell them even on the screen.

The story is basically High Noon if it had been composed by a thousand monkeys banging on typewriters. Oh, monkeys that like speeches. By the time you get to the shootout at the end, you'll wonder where you found the stamina.

The only interesting character gets hanged because Jimmy Stewart can't figure out he'd better take him with him on an emergency call.

Let me repeat: This is a dumb western that takes it's get-along-little-dogies time to get to the final scene. If you want to be spared the agony, just tune in at the last 10 minutes or so. It's still not very satisfying, but it will be merciful not to have to watch the rest.

Law & Order: Rage (1995) Season 5, Episode 13

Made When Law and Order Was Smart

[9/10 · 22 April 2023]

This is a frustrating episode, but in a good way. A Black man (Courtney B. Vance) is accused of murder, but as the investigation and trial wear on, we understand the great amount of alienation and, yes, rage he felt at how he was treated by his White peers at every level, a constant reminder that he was Black. He was subjected to any number of insults, hazing, abuses, and condemnation -- anything he achieved was because he was Black and given a handicap; anything he failed at was because he was Black and inferior.

You don't have to be Black to understand how being a minority of any color in a White society requires minorities to both endure humiliations and to give up something of themselves in order to fit in. Many do. As the episode points out, the choices are to either give up one's identity on some level to fit in or go back to the limited prospects for minorities that racism has produced. And all the while, those benefitting from racism with tell the minority they're the problem.

There are some good moments, such as how it's a group of White district attorneys and psychologists who are putting the Black man on trial, a reminder of how the system replicates itself without the participations even knowing or acknowledging.

When Sam the Eagle -- I thought he was supposed to be superliberal, but then, maybe they're the most guilty -- accuses a Black psychologist of being the true racist by inflaming opinions about race with her writings, it's enough to make any thinking person scream and pull their hair out. In the 1990s, this would have been the prevailing thought. It would be a little harder to get away with it today.

The episode heaps on the indignities, from Vance being mistaken for a bus boy to being told he should go back to the jungle to collect coconuts to one of the partners in the firm refusing to socialize with him in any way.

It's all enough to make your blood boil if you or anyone you know has gone through these sorts of experiences. And that's what makes it such a good episode. The drama is so tight and the ideas so well composed, unless you're the one benefiting from racism, you will be appalled.

But then the end is a cop out. That's the reason it loses a star. It essentially delegitimizes every possibility that racism is as profound a problem in American society as it is and resets everything so the audience can go back to its prejudices. That's a shame. A more ambiguous ending would have been thoughtful.

Law & Order: Criminal Intent: To the Bone (2006) Season 5, Episode 20

Good But Just Misses the Mark to Greatness

[8/10 · 21 April 2023]

Whoopi Goldberg plays a narcissistic psychopath who fosters vulnerable kids and turns them into criminals. The CI team of Logan and Barak go after her after a series of break ins turned massacres. The episode has a lot of tension and not a little pathos, especially for one of the foster kids who has a conscience but is still under the thrall of his ruthless "mother." The ending is particular memorable.

It's a compelling set up we've seen before, in everything from Charles Dickens to Ma Barker -- a dark parental figure who uses their influence to corrupt children. For much of the episode, things ring true. So, why not a 10?

Two main reasons:

1) The dialogue starts to come apart, especially in an interrogation scene between Logan and Goldberg's spidery villain. It's meant to show her prowess at getting under people's skins and manipulating them -- and we're led to believe on some level it works with Logan. That's a mistake. Logan is too hard-headed at this point in his life for it to work so easily. He'd know going in what he's up against and play poker just as ably, even if he loses in the end. And the dialogue starts to become babble, as they seem to trade off a list of psychological hang ups one or the other might have. If you want to see a much cleaner and more effective version of the same thing, watch The Silence of the Lambs.

2) Whoopi Goldberg. In some ways, Goldberg is like William Shatner, which is to say, less is more. Both have strong faces and can communicate volumes with just an expression. So, when they overdo it, the performance starts to overpower the scene. In this case, Goldberg's psychopath is supposed to be so careful, she's flown under the radar for years. Never mind the subtext that poor children tend to be forgotten in the system. We're to believe she not only creates a successful criminal empire but also can keep it quiet for years. Yet, Goldberg can't resist the temptation to ham it up at times. This undermines the very last moment where just a knowing smile aimed at Logan is enough. Now, imagine if she'd played it without telegraphing everything throughout the episode -- that last scene of her smiling would have resonated even more.

So, this is a good episode. Perhaps had it been done earlier in the season, it might have been great.