Netflixable? Sandler’s back in the Sandtrap — “Happy Gilmore 2”

Posted on July 26, 2025 by Roger Moore

Any hopes that Adam Sandler would use his Netflix contract to remake himself in movies like “Hustle” or “The Meyerowitz Stories”were dashed a couple of “Murder Mysteries” ago.

But he’s still doing numbers for the streamer, as his audience aged out of “going to the movies” long ago even if they never really outgrew him.

So why not a sequel to one of the movies that launched him, a title — like his “breakout” hit “Billy Madison” — that gave him the name of his production company, Happy Madison?

“Happy Gilmore 2” brings back his hockey-obsessed golfer who drives the ball with “rage,” which doesn’t really help him with his violence and anger management issues.

It’s a “gang’s all here” comedy that wallows in nostalgia for the original film, which came out 29 years ago. Sentimental curtain calls for performers from the original film who have since died — Carl Weathers and Bob Barker among them — clumsily blend with a parade of unfunny non-acting pro golfers, current and elder statesmen of the game, the usual crony cameos by the likes of Rob Schneider and Dan Patrick and sportscasters even older than Dan Patrick.

And then there’s all those Sandlers in the credits, his wife and kids failing to do much more than land a close-up or three in what plays like a “contractual obligation” outing from Team Sandman.

Of all the lazy, lame, vulgar and crude comedies this guy has churned out between more tolerable “Wedding Singer,” “50 First Dates” or even “Uncut Gems” pictures, this is right down there with “The Ridiculous 6” as among his laziest.

You barely have time to mutter “I wonder how they changed/killed-off the wife” from the first film as the opening credits play — a common failing of fragile ego leading men sequels — before Virginia (Julie Bowen) meets her demise.

To be fair, she still gets lots of screen time in flashbacks and fantasy sequences. Not as much as infamously undisciplined ex-golfer John Daly, who lives in Happy’s garage and joins him in his binge drinking.

Happy killed his wife with an errant tee shot, crawled into the bottle and lost everything. He now supports his four rowdy Boston Bruins-obsessed sons and aspiring ballerina daughter by stocking the produce section of his local market.

A running gag in the picture — Happy’s many “hide my drinking” flasks are concealed in everything from a fake cell phone to a cucumber, golf clubs and even a golf ball.

But he’s not picked up a club in over a decade when is forced back into the game — at 58 (Sandler’s real age) — to raise money for daughter Vienna’s (Sunny Sandler) prospective enrollment in a Paris Opera ballet school.

Sandler’s “Uncut Gems” writer and director Benny Safdie proves he has no gift for comedy playing Frank Manatee, a billionaire starting his own Happy Gilmore-inspired gonzo golf league, who tries to lure Happy out of his miserable “retirement” from the game.

Happy has to hit rock bottom — going to rehab sessions led by Ben Stiller‘s character from the first film — before he realizes his only hope of getting out of the financial hole is a comeback.

“At 58?”

A few awful, tipsy rounds and breaking a few driving range simulators later, he magically manages it. He’s back mingling with aged pros (Nicklaus, Trevino, etc), tactless TV interviewers (Kevin Nealon) and renewing old rivalries.

But where’s his nemesis, Shooter? The “third biggest golfer of the ’90s” (after Happy and “Tiger”)? He (Christopher McDonald) lost his marbles when he lost that gold jacket title to Happy back in ’96. It takes the intervention of golf-disrespecting Mr. Manatee to get Shooter out of a mental institution and back in Happy’s face.

The one moment that this movie came to life for me is when Sandler and McDonald renew their rivalry in a funny fistfight in a cemetery filled with graves of characters (and actors) who died after the first film came out.

Sandler’s one funny line comes when Happy has to half-hearted break-up a hockey brawl amongst his kids at the dinner table.

“Hey hey HEY! We fight in the BASEMENT, not at the table!”

The rest of the film is lame, recycled and unfunny jokes, penis and potty gags, uncommitted performances (Stiller and McDonald give it their all) and appearances by jocks, the descendents of dead actors and Sandler family (and a Stiller offspring, and another McDonald one) members.

It’s a film of “Look, it’s Dennis Dugan (as the “real” golf tour’s chairman),” who directed so many Sandler hits early in his career, or picking out which old golfer is which, trying to ID who this rapper or footballer is orwho that Sandler entourage member/hanger-on (Nick Swardson, etc.) might be.

Nostalgia only gets you so far, and whatever “feels” folks cling to from the original “upset the uptight golf world” original, it’s not enough to float this bloated corpse of a comedy.

Golf isn’t what it was back then, and neither are Happy or Sandler. So no “mulligans” for “Happy Gilmore 2.” A quintuple bogey or Archaeopteryx, a hole-by-hole disaster is still a disaster — in the trap, in the water, very late to the green and tucked onto Netflix where you can ignore it and find something better to watch.

Rating: PG-13, bits of violence, lots of profanity, potty jokes and mooning gags

Cast: Adam Sandler, Julie Bowen, Christopher McDonald, Bennie Safdie, John Daly, Bad Bunny, Haley Joel Osment, several Sandler relatives, Steve Buscemi and Ben Stiller

Credits: Directed by Kyle Newachek, scripted by Tim Herlihy and Adam Sandler. A Netflix release.

Running time:

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Movie Review: For these Gen Z daters, it’s all downhill from “Oh, Hi!”

Posted on July 25, 2025 by Roger Moore

The mating rituals, commitment phobia and communication issues of a much-maligned generation are sent up, with amusingly mixed results, in “Oh, Hi!” — a rom-com that almost goes for it and almost comes off before losing its nerve.

Writer-director Sophie Brooks pairs-up former child star Logan Lerman (“Percy Jackson,” “Fury,” TV’s “We Were the Lucky Ones”) and nepo baby Molly Gordon, who gets a story credit and moves from small supporting roles in “Shiva Baby,” “Booksmart” and TV’s “Animal Kingdom” into the spotlight as a young woman who misreads the signals from her new beau and doesn’t take that well. At all.

And frankly, you can see Iris’s point. She’s loaded up her vintage Jeep Cherokee for a fun weekend in the country, and Isaac seems totally present for the bubbly cute chatterbox who is his companion. Just two young New Yorkers having a sing-along to “Islands in the Stream” on the ride, basking in the upstate scenery, gawking at the over-equipped secluded AirBnB they’ve rented and get right down to sex before a single awkward silence can enter in the conversation.

We figure out it’s “early” in this “relationship.” He’s reading “Blindness” by Jose Camargo and she’s “not really a reader. I’m more of a movie lady.” But she probably didn’t see the film adaptation of that novel, either. “Casablanca” is more her speed.

They share their first impressions of each other — “I thought you were a f—boy.”And they exchange answers on “Have you ever had your heart broken?”

Isaac seems genuinely interested, cooking scallops for her before the evening’s second round of passion. She’s busted into the owners’ S&M stash because “Locked doors give me anxiety.” That may be the most Gen Z line in this.

So, who gets to tie up whom? Isaac agrees, and the novelty of the experience lifts their lovemaking. But his warning might have been the “ever had your heart broken” question and her answer to it. She has and didn’t take it well. “Insane urge to stab” comes up.

Handsome, politically connected Isaac is downright cavalier in dismissing the idea he might have had his “heart broken.” Bluntly contradicting Iris when she starts talking about how well things are going after three dates and “our first trip as a couple” seals his fate.

“I’m not really looking for a relationship right now.”

Those wrist cuffs and ankle cuffs he’s in? They’re not coming off. And as the story is framed within Iris’s call to her ride-or-die Max (Geraldine Viswanathan of “You’re Cordially Invited,” “Thunderbolts*” and “Seven Days”) — “I did a thing…I did something bad.” — we expect the worst.

As Iris decides to hold him captive to try and convince Isaac of their potential, the worst is worse than we fear.

“Oh my God, does he not like FRENCH toast?”

Brooks’ second feature (after “The Boy Downstairs”) doesn’t so much lose its edge as simply give it away. And as it does, the fun and the life sputter out of what might have been a skewering comedy.

Isaac comes off as a barely-sketched-in heel, topping off that with a cluelessness about the fairer sex and human emotions. His inability to “read the room” where Iris is concerned is worsened by insisting he’s just being “honest.” He finishes that off with the occasional “Gen Z Stare”at her reactions.

A generation that gets a bad rap for being fragile and easily hurt and rude by not considering other people’s feelings is sent up in this one character.

But Iris makes a call to her mother (Polly Draper of “thirtysomething”) about her disappointment and Boomer Mom’s advice is every bit as cliched and tone deaf as Isaac’s.

“Sometimes men don’t know what’s best for him.”

John Reynolds scores a chuckle or two as Max’s along-for-the-ride boyfriend, here to advise Iris about the legal problems tying someone up can put you in. And David Cross is the cranky “You kids can’t have sex there” neighbor with virtually nothing funny to do or play.

But the promise in this premise is Gordon’s Iris, a hapless young woman who feels victimized by everything men of her generation’s dating pool fear or simply have no interest in. Gordon made me think of her “Shiva Baby” co-star Rachel Sennott in Iris’s had-enough-attitude, pushing 30 and ready for a relationship, but just now figuring out that Peter Pan Syndrome isn’t just about the prankster, but about the Lost Boys women are waiting to grow up into men you might marry.

Brooks lets her character and her star down by backing away from that edge and going all softboy, like the guy her leading man is playing, as she does.

Rating: R, sex, nudity and profanity

Cast: Molly Gordon, Logan Lerman,
Geraldine Viswanathan, John Reynolds, Polly Draper and David Cross.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Sophie Brooks. A Sony Pictures Classics release.

Running time: 1:34

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Movie Review: This “Fantastic Four” take their stumbling, humorless “First Steps”

Posted on July 24, 2025 by Roger Moore

Comic book cinema goes Mid Century Marvel for “The Fantastic Four: First Steps,” a sleek and gorgeous looking reboot of this franchise that harks back to Fantastic 4 comic and TV cartoon’s heyday.

The film’s true star is production designer Kasra Farahani, who brings the ’60s back to life — on Earth 828 in the multiverse — with sweater vests, bouffants, crew cuts, ties, Homberg hats and jumpsuit fashions, minimalist plastic chairs, Edsels and their tail-finned ilk, all supplemented by the futuristic blessings of what four superhumans and their ability to broker world peace and cooperation might bring.

Yeah, somes cars fly. Mostly cop-cars, but hey…

These kid-friendliest comics tend to park any film attempt at relaunching Fantastic Four in the more juvenile PG/PG-13 realm — “entry level” comic book films for younger viewers. The more comedy the better, with jovial tough-guy banter from Ben Grimm/The Thing, punk put-downs by Johnny Storm the Human Torch and dorky supportive couplespeak from the married Mister Fantastic Reed Richards and his vanishing “Invisible Woman” wife Sue Storm.

But four credited screenwriters couldn’t find a joke if Jerry Seinfeld texted it to them. And our years of blaming the casts for the failure of these films should probably stop, as Pedro Pascal (Mister Fantastic has never been duller and Vanessa Kirby (Sue Storm) never manages more than a moment or two of spark or empathy. They deserved better.

Joseph Quinn has too little that’s fun to say or do as Johnny Storm, and Ebon Moss-Bachrach simply doesn’t register and seems utterly, humorlessly miscast as The Thing.

“Hey, say the thing,” “many ask, some of them joking. You know. The catchphrase. “‘What time is it?'”

“Stop it,” Ben says.

“It’s CLOBBERIN’ time,” you mean? “It’s just in the cartoon,” Ben grimly, bloodlessly reminds us.

Four years of a nation and a world with The Fantastic Four in it have earned them their very own ABC (in Living Color) TV special and appreciation as “the best of us,” us being the human race and Americans boldly embracing the future.

Reed and Sue discover they’re pregnant.

“Nothing’s going to be different.” “EVERYthing’s going to be different!”

Johnny and Ben are happy roommates in a spacious mid century modern penthouse.

And then this “herald” shows up, a Silver Surfer (Julia Garner, not-quite-recognizable in her CGI guise) to warn them that “The Devourer of Worlds,” “Galactus” is on his/its way as “Your planet is now scheduled for destruction.”

Make your peace with it, don’t fight it, you’re done for yadda yadda.

The Four must board the Good Ship Excelsior, find this Gallactus and, you know, “talk.”

We all know what that will mean. And four credited screenwriters know we know. So they barely put any effort into setting up the Big Confrontation, sleepwalking through the opening acts, perfunctorily cutting-and-pasting the suspense free middle act “build up.”

Plot elements, sci-fi inventions and set-pieces are borrowed from “Star Trek,” “Star Wars” and “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.”

While there’s nothing inherently wrong with that, what we see on the screen is gloriously over-designed joylessness. This script had possibilities, and this far less “fantastic” four at the keyboards couldn’t see them or find the fun in this world, these characters or “Clobberin’ time,” when it finally arrives.

The only appropriate response is to throw up one’s hands at Marvel’s inability to get this cornerstone franchise right, with or without the kiddie pool touches.

Rating: PG-13, sci-fi action/violence, mild profanity

Cast: Pedro Pascal, Vanessa Kirby, Ebon Moss-Bachrach, Joseph Quinn, Paul Walter Hauser, Natasha Lyonne, Julia Garner and Ralph Ineson.

Credits: Directed by Matt Shakman, scripted by Josh Friedman, Eric Pearson, Jeff Kaplan and Ian Springer, based on the Jack Kirby/Stan Lee comics. A Marvel Studios release.

Running time: 1:55

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Documentary Review: “It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley”

Posted on July 24, 2025 by Roger Moore


Filmed appreciations of potentially great artists who “die young and leave a beautiful corpse” are many. If these post mortems have a common thread, it’s the difficulty in separating the myth from the musician, painter, actor or writer. And the more “beautiful” the corpse, the greater the hype and the harder that becomes.

Amy Berg’s “It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley” is about the James Dean-gorgeous singer-songwriter Jeff Buckley. An almost uncategorizable guitarist and singer with a piercing falsetto and four-octave range who could rock out to Led Zeppelin and cover Nirvana and yet let us hear his adoration of Judy Garland, Nina Simone and the singular Pakistani singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Buckley sang and wrote insightful, soulful and self-revealing folk-rock ballads.

His story is marked by brief triumph and lingering tragedy. Buckley only finished one critically-acclaimed album, with “Grace” worshipped by everyone from David Bowie to Alanis Morissette. He’s best-known for his cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” which topped the charts over a decade after his death, at 31 in 1997.

And he’s famous for being the son of another acclaimed singer-songwriter who died very young, Tim Buckley, a man he only met once and someone Jeff spent his career trying to separate himself from in interviews, many of which are sampled here.

Berg, the Oscar-nominated director of the “West of Memphis” doc about the West Memphis Three, with a Janis Joplin documentary and a damning Mormon church takedown among her credits, puts a lot of Buckley’s story in his own words, leaning most heavily on his mother, girlfriends and bandmates to flesh out his story.

You have to read a Buckley bio or his Wikipedia page to realize how disingenuous his “don’t call me Tim Buckley’s kid” and “next question” stance regarding his famous father. Buckley was raised “Scottie Moorhead,” taking his stepdad’s name.

He chose to become “Jeff Buckley.” And his big break was performing at a 1991 tribute concert for his father, the son weeping as he sang a song his father wrote about him and the mother (he married Mary Guibert when they were teens) that Tim Buckley abandoned when she got pregnant.

Jeff signed to Columbia Records, “Dylan’s label,” and Springsteen’s. He was yet another singer-songwriter given that “next Bob Dylan” hype.

Berg had not only a potential chip-off-the-old-icon star-in-the-making figure to profile. She had a “complicated” character to try and unravel, a poetic young man who fell for theater actress Rebecca Moore, moved on from her to pursue singer/songwriter Aimee Mann, among others, before falling for fellow musician Joan Wasser.

“It’s Never Over,” a play on the title of his song “I Know It’s Over,” hews to Buckley’s stated wish to interviewers for people to get past his lineage and his looks and appreciate “my music.” Much of Buckley’s musical output is sampled in performance and in recordings as we see pages from his notebooks — often rendered into graphics — illustrating the tune and underscoring the careworn crafted lyrics.

“There’s the moon asking to stay
Long enough for the clouds to fly me away
Oh, it’s my time coming,
I’m not afraid
Afraid to die…”

When you write songs like “Grace” with lines about your mortality, and then you die by drowning during an impulsive plunge into a Memphis river while singing Led Zeppelin (“Whole Lotta Love”), when your androgynous beauty beguiles girlfriends, fans and record execs alike, and your dad died young too, it’s no wonder that Buckley “lore” overwhelms any attempt to size up the talent and space occupied in the culture by someone like Jeff Buckley.

The archival interviews with Jeff reveal some, but not all. Berg’s film gets intimate when it lets us hear loving or even testy phone messages left for his mother and amusing when we learn of the comical old fashioned radio drama he created for his outgoing answering machine message.

And it gives Buckley fans lots of the music and some of the details and color of the life that Buckley lived. Will it create new fans? Buckley’s fame and reputation only truly exploded after his death and after post mortem hype by Rolling Stone and others. He could be due to a new cycle of interest and famous musician endorsements.

Or maybe his reputation will settle in exactly the same spot his father’s did — lauded after a premature death, his voice, looks and reputation forever preserved at that moment in time, a great “might have been” worshipped for what never quite was.

Rating: unrated, adult subject matter

Cast: Jeff Buckley, Mary Guibert, Rebecca Moore, Michael Tighe, Joan Wasser and Ben Harper

Credits: Directed by Amy Berg. An HBO Films production, a Magnolia release.

Running time: 1:46

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Classic Film Review: Anna May Wong is the “Lady from Chungking” (1942)

Posted on July 23, 2025 by Roger Moore

Anna May Wong, the first Chinese American movie star, was already famous — a Hollywood mainstay since the silent film era who first appeared on screen at 14 back in 1919 — when World War II broke out.

With the United States now allied with China in the Pacific War against imperialist Japan, that could have been a golden era of opportunities for an established star with her exotic good looks and experience.

But it wasn’t. American films about the long-running Second Sino-Japanese War made during WWII were rare, and she wasn’t cast in John Wayne’s “Flying Tigers,” then and now the most obvious story to sell to American audiences. China’s ongoing civil war, with war lords holding the balance of power between the Nationalists of Chiang Kai-Shek and the Communists of Mao Zedong, made it a messy, unreliable ally, and not the most promising source of Hollywood stories.

And the same racism that kept Wong from landing the lead in MGM’s Peal Buck China epic “The Good Earth” in the ’30s (Caucasian actors in “yellow face” got those parts) limited her to a couple of war films as her film career — she also did a lot of acting for radio — went into steep decline. She is celebrated today for her ground-breaking representation as much as her movies.

“Lady from Chungking” (1942) was her last starring role, and like her next-to-last starring role, her other WWII film, “Bombs Over Burma,” it’s a short feature filmed quickly and cheaply for Producers Releasing Corporation, A Hollywood “poverty row” distributor. She was only 37 when it came out.

Her presence in the film is the only thing that justifies labeling it a “classic. But it’s a fascinating very early exercise in serving up what would become a genre “resistance” story, this one set in China and built around a formidable leading lady.

It was directed by a prolific B-movie filmmaker with little sense of style, but often used on cheap thrillers with Asian (often played by “yellow face” Caucasian) characters and settings. The sets look like Old West haciendas repurposed as Chinese. The film opens in a rice paddy, damned hard to fake in sunbaked SoCal, then and now. And the aircraft in a prolonged dogfight sequence that opens the film seem about a dozen years out of date.

Wong is Kwan Mei, posing as a simple “Coolie,” forced to labor in the rice fields under an armed Japanese overseer (Angelo Cruz. Ahem.). She is quick to slyly intervene when co-workers and children are threatened, polished in knowing how to quote Japanese propaganda like the “Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere” that they labeled their conquests.

Kwan Mei is leader of a resistance cell. She decides when to kill that overseer, by whose hand it will be and by what method — knife.

She’s got her eyes on the bigger prize. She’ll play passive and cooperative with the Japanese Lieutenant (Ted Hecht, cough cough), play along with his scheme to set her up as of “noble” birth, catnip to his incoming boss, General Kaimura (Harold Huber). She knows her “duty to the New Order.” And she wants to get closer to this “butcher.”

A couple of Flying Tigers — U.S. volunteer combat airmen — getting shot down right over that rice paddy complicate this plot. Rick Vallin and Paul Bryar play the one “those dirty little nips plugged” and the one “the nips” capture.

She needs to win over the obsequios German (Ludwig Donath) who “Heil Hitlers” the Japanese, always admitting “‘Banzai!’ is much better!” He’s a “businessman” who plays both sides of the conflict.

Then there’s the matter of luring the general away from the Anglo-Russian blonde saloon singer (Mae Clark, who was also in “Flying Tigers”).

But Kwan Mei is nothing if not resourceful, and seductive and cunning. She doses the general’s drink and asks him about the invading force he’s bringing up from The South.

“Yes, by the thousands, and within 24 hours! But let’s not talk about that now,” he admits, in his best Frank Drebin.

The plot is “flag waver” simple, the characters “stock” and despite the occasional Asian face in the cast, too many of those characters are played by Gringos. Or Latinos.

Wong doesn’t exactly dazzle in the lead. But she manages to come off as formidable and calculating. Friends and relatives will be sacrificed in pursuit of her partisan goals. Her loyalty will be questioned. But you know who’s going to have the gun in her hand when it counts. It’s not much of a picture, but she carries it.

Bit parts and poverty row pics from this stage of her career onwards are no way to judge Wong’s talents and the potential that Hollywood never let her live up to. Her best silents and mid-30s dramas and thrillers suggest the star who might have been and the representation that might have made a bigger difference in a Hollywood reluctant to truly look like the American Melting Pot, and give every corner of the culture someone it could identify with on screen.

Rating: TV-PG, violence

Cast: Anna May Wong, Harold Huber, Mae Clark, Rick Vallin, Ted Hecht, Walter Soo Hoo, James B. Leong, Archie Got, Paul Bryar and Ludwig Donath.

Credits: Directed by William Nigh, scripted by Sam Robin. A Producers Releasing Corp. release on Tubi, other streamers.

Running time: 1:06

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Movie Review: “The Musicians” become a reluctant String Quartet

Posted on July 22, 2025 by Roger Moore

“The Musicians” is a droll comedy about four string highly-strung string players who must come together as a “quartet” to perform an original composition on four legendary instruments for a worldwide classical music TV audience.

If I haven’t scared you off yet, let me point out that it’s in French, and the title is actually “Les musiciens” in its native tongue.

Everybody not interested in the subject moved on? Good. Now that the riff raff have wandered, the rest of us can revel in the subtle and ever-so-dry classical music comedy that director Grégory Magne and co-writer Haroun have conjured up.

It’s a burlesque of fragile egos and mismatched personalities, of exquisite instruments played by real musicians who know their craft and know the “types” drawn to their sort of work. There’s little that’s broad about it and nothing that could be mistaken for farce as performed La Comédie-Française. But there are lots of chuckles at personality clashes and vanities and the odd moment that approaches the sublime.

A renowned luthier (François Ettori) gives the confirmation that sets our plot in motion. He’s run a proctoscope inside a cello and confirmed that this instrument is by Antonio Stradivari, that the chisel marks identify it as not only from the peak era of the greatest violin maker’s work, but that it’s from “the same tree, perhaps the same board” (in French with English subtitles) as three other instruments.

This is the famed (and apparently fictional) “San Domenico” collection, four instruments ordered and made and then forfeited to a bank leading to long, colorful and traveled performing lives in the ensuing centuries since Stradivari worked at Piazza San Domenico in the Italian city of Cremona.

Astrid (Valérie Donzelli) must have this instrument to fulfill her father’s passion — to own all four “San Domenico” instruments, from the same tree, and have four of the greatest musicians in the world play them as a string quartet.

It doesn’t matter how impractical and pricey this turns out to be — “ten million,” is the price of the cello, she guesses. No, not Euros or dollars. Pounds. Her brother’s (Nicolas Bridet) protests notwithstanding, Astrid was daddy’s choice to chair the board of their highway construction company. And she’s hellbent on helping him realize his impractical dream.

She lands a vain superstar George (Mathieu Spinosi) violinist whose album covers “make you look like Michael Bolton.” The perfectionist cellist Lise (Marie Vialle) and brooding violinist Peter (Daniel Garlitsky) have “history.”

Violist Apolline (Emma Ravier)? She’s a young, perky blonde who never studied at a conservatory, but a polished Youtube star with a large social media presence. If she’s a classical music influencer, that may have something to do with posting bikini shots of herself on vacation.

Once Astrid wins the auction for the cello, she summons all four to a family estate built to house the instruments, with rehearsal rooms, the peace and quiet of nature with no wifi to distract them and a hottub that doesn’t work.

The comedy comes from the lightly clashing egos — George has the biggest, a diva who starts every sentence as concert master of this quartet with “I,” something Peter — reluctantly here with a woman he used to play with and love — never tires of pointing out.

Astrid’s choice of music, a never-performed work by a favorite living composer of her father’s, Charlie Beaumont, is odd. Ancient instruments like these gathered together for a showcase would seem to suggest baroque or classical era quartets to mark such an august occasion.

As the broadcast and recording contract deals are worked out and the concert in an acoustically pristine old church looms, the players struggle with the music and the highhanded way George runs the rehearsals. Astrid gets desperate enough to beg Beaumont himself (Frédéric Pierrot) to give up his life of seclusion, recording birdsong in the wild as inspiration, to come in and help.

It’s a hard sell as he likes his solitude and had given up on “ever hearing” this quartet he composed thirty years before. Even after he relents, he’s reluctant to tangle with these egos, and he’s not sure he remembers what he was thinking when he composed the work. Something to do with the sounds of “starlings,” maybe?

In any event, reaquainting himself with a work Astrid’s father loved only confirms Charlie’s fears about it.

“I hate my piece.”

Can this concert be saved?

Casting real musicians to actually play the work in question may have been a gimmick, but it lends the picture an authenticity rare for a screen comedy. The feuding players, clashing styles and egos and Apolline’s cover-sharing on social media and sophmoric hijinks could doom the entire enterprise.

But the music always comes first, and whatever disparate backgrounds these four share, Magne (“Perfumes” was his) lovingingly lets us see them rediscover that commitment and the joy it brings.

An impromptu jam is the best scene in “The Musicians,” an offhand, fireside performance of a classic American folk lament made famous by Bill Monroe, Loretta Lynn, Dolly Parton, Robert Plant and Allison Krause, Nirvana and Lead Belly.

“In the Pines” is a tune every “musician” should and would know, plucked and bowed and sung with geniune soul here by musicians who know “classical music” didn’t end with Beethoven or Tchaikovsky.

Rating: unrated

Cast: Valérie Donzelli,
Frédéric Pierrot, Mathieu Spinosi, Emma Ravier,
Marie Vialle and, Nicolas Bridet,
François Ettori and Daniel Garlitsky

Credits: Directed by Grégory Magne, scripted by Haroun and Grégory Magne. An Outsider Pictures release.

Running time: 1:42

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Netflixable? A few thoughts on “Trainwreck: Balloon Boy”

Posted on July 20, 2025 by Roger Moore

Like most folks, I suspect, I didn’t figure there was much if anything more that could or should be said about the “Great Balloon Boy Hoax of ’09.” So there wasn’t much interest in this latest Netflix “Trainwreck” doc about pop culture events gone sideways.

But I glimpsed a few excerpts from reviews from respectable publications that suggest that filmmaker/interviewer Gillian Pachter planted the seeds of doubt as to whether or not this “hoax” was a hoax after all.

Watching “Trainwreck: Balloon Boy,” I’m not sure she did. That doesn’t mean she didn’t score points against the prosecutors in this tale — the Colorado Sheriff and sheriff’s department that charged them, the media that embraced this story and turned on the Heene family in a flash and the public’s lemming-like rush to judgement in such situations.

Yes, a lot of that public opinion was formed by the way a six year-old child, interviewed on live TV, described what had been going on as “for a show.” Maybe young Falcon Heene, the “boy” his family thought had flown away in that UFO balloon, was talking about whatever his family was planning on doing with this wacky inflatable flying saucer experiment that they were filming. And that isn’t necessarily damning, if you buy into their TV pilot pitch that “went wrong” claim. Or maybe Falcon was talking about the “show” that all this attention — local and national TV news, etc. — brought his family.

Yes, the police tactics — a mixture of lies, cajolery, threats and leading questions posed to Richard Heene and in a separate interview, his Japanese-American wife Mayumi Heene — were suspect. Some of that is on display in damning police interrogation tapes, including a “manipulated” –Sheriff Jim Alderden claims — lie detector test Richard took,  most are the hallmarks of a fine bit of Colorado railroading.

Yes, the kid Falcon, interviewed 15 years later, comes off as credible and innocent today. We’re allowed to wonder, just based on him, if maybe this wasn’t a hoax after all.

But if their plea-dealing lawyer, David Lane, has a point about “They had no case, nothing” about the prosecution, then why did anybody involved pitch or accept that “deal” that put Richard Heene in jail for a month and landed his not-yet-a-citizen wife on probation?

It’s a real can-of-worms film, in which the sheriff comes off like most sheriffs — blustery, spinning and law-unto-himself bully — the father comes off as a manic on-the-spectrum flake with the neighbors who knew this family perhaps being be the most credible witnesses of all.

And if that’s true, maybe it was a hoax, or maybe it wasn’t, as those neighbors themselves wonder as they admit going back and forth about this.

The most damning thing about this entire “stunt” is the family’s behavior, captured on their own video, of the moment they think their littlest boy was hiding in the gondola of their “flying saucer” that slipped its balloon tethers . They give what look like “performances.” And they damned well make sure to keep those performances in the frame of their locked-down/tripod-fixed camera.

The second most damning thing is our reminder that TV news has never shaken its collective mania for an inconsequential but telegenic and “dramatic” story, this one about a child in peril. Joseph Pulitzer, over 150 years ago, summed up an ethos that has never left our profession, even after we started calling ourselves “journalists.”

“News,” the famous newspaper baron said, “is anything that makes somebody go ‘Gee whiz.'”

Even when this started to look like a hoax, few people in law enforcement or in the media asked the right follow-up questions.

Did Mayumi, whose broken English all these years later comes off as fishy, misunderstand what she was “confessing” to, under pressure? Sheriff Alderden trots out her “English major” college grad from Japan and some college in the U.S. bonafides.

But if she’s that bright, how did she end up marrying and raising a family with this flakey, breathless savant, which is a generous way of describing the “attention whore” with no visible (in the film) means of support, Richard Heene?

“Balloon Boy” leaves us with more questions than credible answers, which can’t have been Pachter’s goal all along. She doesn’t quite make the maybe-not-a-hoax sale, despite her best efforts.

One thing that should surprise no one is where the Heenes landed when they fled infamy and Colorado.

Florida? Sure. Bradenton? That’s just too on-the-nose. I used to live there and work at the newspaper. That corner of the state was and is a cheap living magnet for musicians — some of the more infamous Allmann Brothers bandmates, this Brit band’s drummer, that famous bass player.

And it’s tucked tightly between the “sideshow freak” settlement of Ruskin, and the old circus town Mr. Ringling built up, Sarasota.

So when Heene promises “something new” and “something big” he’s a put to unveil at the end of “Trainwreck,” he’s in the right place to humbug that. “Hokum” is all around him. He must feel right at home.

Rating: TV-MA

Cast: Richard Heene, Mayumi Heene, Bob Heffernan, Dean Askew, Jim Alderden, Jimmy Negri, Tina Chavez, Bradford Heene, David Lane and Falcon Heene

Credits: Scripted and directed by Gillian Pachter. A Netflix release.

Running time: :52

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Series Review: Bana and DeWitt are at their best “Untamed”

Posted on July 20, 2025 by Roger Moore

The stunning scenery of Yosemite National Park, sturdy performances by Eric Bana and Sam Neill and Rosemarie DeWitt’s best turn since “Mad Men” recommend “Untamed,” an engrossing murder mystery that trots through genre tropes and leans into melodrama but never stops being worthy of our attention.

It’s a tale about crimes of the present re-entangling people trapped by pasts destined to catch up with them. Murders, dormant investigations, wildlife being wild and secrets and lies are uncovered in one of the most gorgeous with the most gorgeous backdrop imaginable.

The Aussie Bana, star of two similar Australian Outback detective thrillers (“The Dry,” and “Force of Nature”), is perfectly cast as Kyle Turner, an Investigative Services Branch detective with the National Park Service at Yosemite, a grizzled man’s man outdoorsman who likes to investigate his cases — deciding or not if this fall, that mauling or disappearance is a crime — by horseback.

He’s a loner, divorced, a dad given to long life-lesson conversations with his little boy. We quickly figure out that the kid’s been dead for five years. We guess that’s when ended his marriage (DeWitt plays the realtor wife, remarried but suffering in her own way), sent Kyle into a bottle and has him teetering on the edge of suicide.

Hunting for his child’s killer broke him, and now some law firm’s investigator is asking him about his mental state all those years ago, when a man disappeared in the park and somebody is aiming to file a “wrongful death” claim about how the case was mishandled.

His boss (Sam Neill) is ever-understanding and indulgent, protecting Kyle from the park’s PF-conscious Director Hamilton (Joe Holt), grabbing the car-keys when he’s had too much.

Kyle needs to be sharp as the park’s had a high-profile death on El Capitan, the climbers’ Mecca in the midst of all this untamed nature. We see that plunge in a gripping/shocking opening scene. As the series progresses, Kyle pieces together bits of the back story that put this young woman on that summit and sent her over the edge there.

No grizzled investigator can pursue a case without a newby by his side. Lily Santiago of TV’s “La Brea” plays Vasquez, an L.A. cop and single mom and new-to-wilderness park ranger assigned to shadow and assist him. We will see many of the dazzling vistas and the unforgiving nature of the beautiful terrain and its critters (digital deer and bears) through her eyes.

So much can go wrong in a remote, forbidding place where natural dangers abound and there are no witnesses to the unnatural ones.

“How do we catch them,” then, Vasquez wants to know of those responsible for this disappearance or that “accident?”

“We don’t.”

The “jumper” will face a coroner’s probing and Kyle’s astute observations, which carry out into the wild as he retraces her last hours and days.

Other deaths and disappearances will be introduced into the mystery. There’s a drug problem in and around the park, with sketchy characters linked to it. A wildlife management officer (Wilson Bethel) comes off as a prickly rival for Kyle’s “man of the wilderness” title. Kyle’s rubbed more rangers than just Milch (William Smillie) the wrong way.

But maybe weathered Native American employee Jay (Raoul Max Trujillo) can keep Kyle on the right path, in between cracks about being on “the white man’s” payroll on land stolen by “the white man.” And Vasquez brings enough to the table to make the park service veteran question his limits and methodologies as a sleuth.

“So what might the next move be for a cop down in LA?”

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The Killer Bit that Got “Colbert” canceled?

Posted on July 18, 2025 by Roger Moore

It was this. Not the Turkish mustache business. “The Big Fat Bribe” rant.

Paramount will rue the day it didn’t simply pay out on his contract rather than have him sticking around for more months, bad-mouthing Skydance, Paramount and their apparent Big Daddy, Trump.

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Movie Review: A COVID/BLM Protests/Trumpism-Conspiracy allegory set in “Eddington,” New Mexico

Posted on July 18, 2025 by Roger Moore

There’s a veritable NRA convention of ordnance discharged in “Eddington,” Ari Aster’s All American parable of “How did we get here?”

But the one weapon not discharged is the most apt metaphor for the latest from the writer/director of “Midsommar,” “Hereditary” and the Joaquin Phoenix puzzle “Beau is Afraid.” “Eddington” is a shotgun of a movie, aiming at many targets and trying to hit them with all the randomness of a 12 gauge shell full of pellets.

It’s kind of a mess, but an ambitious one hitting on themes Aster’s fans will recognize as his favorites. And as Aster scores points on conspiracy-obsessed America, cultish America, gun-fetishizing America, virtue signalling America and the limits of “back the blue,” he’s pretty much earned the right to be heard out, if not the benefit of the doubt.

The microcosm of society here is a tiny, dying New Mexico town where the longtime sheriff (Joaquin Phoenix) has come up with a laundry list of reasons why he won’t wear a mask as the country shuts down and the “mask to stop the spread of COVID and save lives” vs “I ain’t maskin’ cuz FREEDOM” divide opens up.

Sheriff Joe Cross (subtle) defies the statewide mandate in front of Mayor Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal) and others, a version of the last straw between these two locals who have history, which is connected to Cross’s fragile, conspiracy-crank wife (Emma Stone).

Not many people respect the sheriff. We’ve seen a crazed homeless man (a nearly unrecognizable Clifton Collins Jr.) drop him and evade capture in front of a city council meeting at the mayor’s closed-by-COVID bar. And we’ve met the last deputies (Michael Ward and Luke Grimes) who will work for Cross, and let’s just say they’re not exactly White Sands test-facility job candidates.

The mayor’s gay punk son (Matt Gomez Hidaka) and others like live-streaming the sheriff as he stumbles through his duties and tries to control his temper and hide his cluelessness. Popularly elected or not, the town has grown jaded on him, and one suspects the mask thing is about more than “I have asthma.” He’s ready to run for mayor on a “How did we get here?” anti-mask, “There IS no COVID in Eddinton” platform.

His “getting better” but dark web-obsessed wife and her even crazier mother (Deidre O’Connell) have fallen in with a charismatic “How the world REALLY works” cult leader (Austin Butler).

There’s a big data processing facility that promises to “bring jobs” and suck the local aquifer dry as it makes crypto-dolts temporarily rich. That’s another issue in a Cross “campaign” run by attacking everyhing the mayor is for, and by enlisting his two county-payroll deputies (there is no dispatcher) as campaign workers.

He’s decorated his Sevilla Co. sheriff’s dept. SUV with print-shop misspelled slogans, an effort that takes an even darker turn a we see the suspicious bursts of violence inserted into nationwide Black Lives Matter protests which Fox News, the sheriff and the old and white electorate insist are “George Soros backed…antifa terrorists.”

National TV coverage will bleed into Eddington’s politics and everything we saw in Minneapolis, Portland and elsewhere will play out on a smaller scale in this not-quite-empty town on the edge of an Indian reservation which has tribal/pueblo police jurisdiction issues with the law-unto-himself sherrif.

Blood will be spilled and the viewer will be jolted at how quickly and how wide the schism between the “free-dumb” crowd, and the “woke,” sane and often annoying virtue signallers — from the unseen governor on down to high school white guilt agitator Sarah (Amélie Hoeferle), whom Brian (Cameron Mann) obsesses over, whom his gay bestie Eric the mayor’s son (Hidaka) toys with and who has “history” with one of the deputies.

If that reads like a LOT of plot and characters and agendas, it is. Aster has as much keeping them straight as we do.

So it’s almost natural that the third act descends into bloody first-person-shooter video-game styled mayhem, with under-identified outsider-snipers, the pueblo police, the sheriff and others caught up in it.

There’s nothing like raid-a-gun-shop wanton slaughter to thin out a cast and simplify a plot contrived to show America along its fault lines.

Phoenix is settling into middle aged man roles well enough, and he makes this simple man with the power of life and death over everybody alarmingly his own. Cross seems depressed, barely holding it together. And he’s armed and like all law enforcement, knows just what he can get away with. Pascal gives a shallow, shiny political sheen to the mayor that makes a nice contrast.

Stone and O’Connell border on parodies of conspiracy cranks, a group beyond parody. The younger players play up the fickle nature of “politics” among teens just learning to be outraged, sometimes just to attract the cute girl who’s outraged herself.

And Collins staggers through the picture, the personification of that insoluable problem no one wants to deal with or see. The mentally ill homeless? Sure. But he could also be a stand-in for victims and perpetrators of violence or for a schizophrenic country that’s lost its collective mind, and its way.

Making sense of it all on Aster’s behalf is hard enough. But “Eddington” runs up against a challenge even he can’t have forseen. It’s just unlikeable, with unpleasant characters, unpunished wrongs and wanton violence as a shortcut to unraveling any quandary or mystery.

Holding up a mirror like this was never going to win a lot of friends. Aster so stuffs that mirror with ugliness that “Eddington” is harder to take than it is to decipher.

If he knew more about firearms, he’d have recognized these targets as more suitable to precision — sniper rifles — and not his shotgun-hope-I-hit-something approach.

Rating: R, graphic violence, explicit nudity, profanity

Cast: Joaquin Phoenix, Pedro Pascal, Emma Stone, Deidre O’Connell, Michael Ward, Luke Grimes, Matt Gomez Hidaka, Amélie Hoeferle, Cameron Mann, Austin Butler and Clifton Collins, Jr.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Ari Aster. An A24 release.

Running time: 2:25

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