Movie Preview: McKenna Grace and Jojo Regina plays sisters who lay low after Momma’s Death — “What We Hide”

Posted on July 14, 2025 by Roger Moore

The System and a punk placed by Dacre Montgomery menace these two in “What we Hide,” which opens Aug. 29.

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Movie Preview: A 1980s effort to comically restart The Peloponnesian War – “A Spartan Dream”

Posted on July 13, 2025 by Roger Moore

An ’80s period piece with a dollop of Greco American whimsy?

Cute. And way before Gerry Butler made “This is SPARTA” a great rallying cry and punchline.

Aug.15.

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Netflixable? Tyler Perry’s Back in Drag for “Madea’s Destination Wedding”

Posted on July 13, 2025 by Roger Moore

You just know that what few conditions Netflix probably had in the big fat contract it gave the prolific Tyler Perry, one of them was “Give us a Madea movie every now and then.”

Because even if his hilariously outspoken drag alter ego had run her course with a paying theatrical movie audience, there are plenty of people who can’t get enough of the wit and wisdom of the two-fisted, foul-mouthed font of great granny giggles that Madea serves up.

And you knew that his farewell tour with the character, “Madea’s Farewell Play” was not the last we’d see of her, her curmedgeonly cuddle bunny Joe (Perry as well) and that vast extended family of insult-slinging slaptstickers, including The Browns.

“Madea’s Destination Wedding” is like all of the recent Madea movies — scribbled in haste, with dashes of improvised insults and the like by Perry and his repertory company — Cassi Davis as the teetering bowling pin Aunt Bam, David Mann as bad, broad and loud Leroy Brown, Tamela J. Mann as as Cora, etc.

His debut feature, “Diary of a Mad Black Woman” had some edge. But as Perry went to the Madea well time and again, the formula boiled down to the bare basics — find a situation to put her in — Jail, Christmas, a Funeral, Halloween — and turn the heffer loose in the china shop, bitching, threatening, swaggering and insulting until the closing credits.

So the set up here is a “Destination Wedding” at a (product placement) Bahamas resort, with that great grandniece Tiffany (Diamond White) rushing into marriage with a model-pretty cornrowed creep named Zavier (Xavier Smalls).

He rubs her divorced dad (Perry as Atlanta DA Brian) the wrong way. You KNOW great grandma Madea and granddad Joe (Perry and Perry) are going to get their backs up about the hastily arranged wedding (by Tiffany’s sketchy mom, Debrah (Taja V. Simpson).

Zavier likes casually dropping the “n” word on his prospective in-laws.

“We don’t SAY n—a in THIS house, n—a!”

Madea’s got to fret about overseas travel and the prospect of a passport.

“I am ILLEGAL in 92 countries!”

Brian’s bright but indulged, childish 19 year old son (Jermaine Harris doing an Urkel homage) puts Joe in another “You need to beat the kid’s ass” for this, that and the other, otherwise, Brian’s just “a little bitch” of a parent.

The Bahamas trip has airport hijinks, flight gripes and on arrival, a chance for Madea to dig into the “real” reasons for this rapid coupling and Joe to hit the card tables in a “charge it to the room” spree.

There’s a lot less of Madea’s odd word-mangling and a bit less of her, frankly, in this latest iteration.

A few laughs turn up, but everything seems played with only the novelty of rageaholics Madea and Joe, and Brown, Bam and Cora reacting to the same nonsense of a thousand other wedding comedies, trials of travel and family fracus farces.

This stuff doesn’t write itself, but it does seem as if Perry’s put the whole enterprise on autopilot, and his supporting “family” can’t riff or improvise much that’s funny into the worn out formula. He may not be as ambitious as he once was, but Madea has long been a “safe” space for him renew his popularity when the melodramas, thrillers and more challenging stories he tries to tell don’t work or connect with an audience.

I dare say this won’t be the last “Madea” Netflix comedy. But what we’ve got here is a not-really-trying model for all the Madeas from here on out.

Rating: PG-13, violence (Madea style), drug jokes, sexual jokes and profanity

Cast: Tyler Perry, Cassi Davis, David Mann, Tamela J. Mann, Taja V. Simpson, Diamond White, Jermaine Harris and Xavier Smalls.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Tyler Perry. A Tyler Perry Studios release on Netflix.

Running time: 1:44

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The Unheeded Climate Warnings of James Burke’s “After the Warming” (1989)

Posted on July 12, 2025 by Roger Moore

The record-warm winters, the baking hot summers — some dry, others filled with historic floods from “extraordinary rain events” — have a lot of people ready to lecture each other on when these “just as predicted” consequences of climat change popped up on our cultural radars.

Wags will point to this series of print stories, that bit of NASA science-backed alarm or Al Gore’s culturally divisive documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth.”

That 2006 two time Oscar winner from director Davis Guggenheim marked a moment in time when nearly everyone could force themselves to admit “Well, we were warned.”

Unfortunately, what that film really marked with the great divide between those able to grasp and reason with hard, ugly facts and the know-nothings of the the alt-conservative universe, back by the aren’t-ageing-well lies of the fossil fuel lobby, who dug in their heels for further decades of denying what was becoming obvious to anybody with a memory and two eyes to watch was what happening all around us.

Start with the knee-jerk hatred that inflamed that corner of the culture for Al Gore, probably the legitimate president in 2000 and not the accident-prone big oil-bought numbskull G.W. Bush, and it was inevitable that “climate change” became the irrational “woke” buzzphrase of its day, beaten into the simpletons unable to discern facts from Fox News.

But like Gore, I remember the filmed warning about what was to come thanks to a fossil fuel/deforestation driven warming planet. It was on public TV 17 years BEFORE “An Inconvenient Truth.”

As I scrolled through the memes and lectures aimed at the Texas weather disaster — yeah, let the oligarchs defund FEMA — and those acting shocked SHOCKED at what is happening on Bluesky today, I hunted down James Burke’s “After the Warming,” a 1989 two-part doc for public TV (in the US and UK) in which he depicted a 2050 where some of the worst climate changed disaster had happened, and what the smarter, more proactive and progressive leaders of Earth were doing about it.

Ironically, one of the first links served up by the dubiously biased Google Search, was this unsigned screed of utter BS from the professional liars at The Energy Advocate. Printed eight years AFTER the programs aired, this “review” is not aging well, and I daresay your kids are relieved you didn’t sign your name to it, Coal Porter.

The just-concluced warmest year in recorded history made every word of that 1997 screed a lie.

I’d track down Burke’s special any time I noticed the changing sea life (different species of barnacles growing on my boat hull), longer fire seasons, dryer summers — interrupted by lots of hurricanes — shifts in the climate of Florida during my 20-odd years living there.

Check it out below. It’s still alarming, even if not every worst-case-scenario has come to pass.

If we’d started listening to reason and voting against paid-off climate change deniers back then, none of us would have had to deal with irrational, ignorant Al Gore haters when he gave voice to the obvious in “An Inconvenient Truth” 17 years after “After the Warming.”

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BOX OFFICE: Up, up and A-Waaaaay! “Superman” rolls up $122 million opening

Posted on July 12, 2025 by Roger Moore

Audiences are reminding Hollywood that “In Gunn We Trust,” as James Gunn’s take on DC’s venerable “Superman,” the original superhero, proves to have plenty of gas in the tank.

I saw it with a pretty packed crowd for a 2pm Thursday matinee in America-beyond-the-Interstates, a sure indication it was opening well — $22.5 million Thursday afternoon and evening, over $56 million Thursday/Friday, per Deadline.com.

A robust Saturday set the table for a $122million opening weekend, as reported by The Numbers.

Gunn found an able actor to play the lighthearted, resilient Man of Steel, albeit a complete unknown with the less-than-catchy moniker David Corenswet. He let Nathan Fillion’s “Green Lantern” land laughs and paired-up Clark Kent/Superdooperman with Margot Kidder 2.0 Rachel Brosnahan as Lois Lane and found fun in cub reporter Jimmy Olsen (Skyler Gisondo) as a reporter/playa.

Nicholas Hoult’s Musky Lex Luthor wasn’t overwhelming, with a vague “agenda” and a lot of “brains over brawn” cracks that fool no one and aren’t funny. And the plot is cluttered with characters and way too much fan service to suit many. I heard plenty of sighs of disappointment in the crowd I saw it with, and reviews have been less than overwhelming from the real movie critics over at Metacritic, myself included.

Conservative push-back about how “woke” it is to have a superhero immigrant (plenty of diversity, and immigrants and just plain foreigners that Superman wants to save, in this reboot) and an extremely unpopular president’s attempt to pass himself off as an undiapered tiny-fingered felon/rapist “Man” of Steel aren’t dampening the take.

Yeah, the memes are strong with this one.

However, it didn’t come close to weeks earlier projections of a $140 million opening.

“Jurassic World: Rebirth” is losing well over half its opening weekend take, but still adding another $40 million.

“F1”  cleared $13 million, and be over the $150 million mark, domestically, by next weekend. Best blockbuster in theaters. See it.

The “How to Train Your Dragon” remake tallied another $7.8 million and enjoys one more weekend in the top five.

“Elio” will definitely fall out of fifth place NEXT weekend, and the $3 million it takes in this weekend points to it petering out in the $75 million range, maybe a tad more, by the time it finishes its run.

“28 Years Later” falls to sixth, the year’s biggest hit “Lilo & Stitch” slides to seventh.

“Mission: Impossible,” “M3GAN 2.0” and “Materialists” round out the top ten.

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Netflixable? Dutch Duo are on the case as “Almost Cops”

Posted on July 12, 2025 by Roger Moore

The Dutch word for “buddy picture” is “vriendenfilm.” They take their shot at the genre with a cop/buddy action comedy, “Almost Cops,” whose title in Dutch is “Bad Boas,” a cute pun.

That’s funnier than anything in this stunningly unsurprising stroll through Cliche City. I basically can’t list anybody in the credits beyond the leads without giving away the plot. Three credited screenwriters and three “script contribution” writers do the worst job in living memory at hiding the “mystery” at the heart of their tale of Rotterdam corruption, drug dealing, gang wars and the Community Service Officers out of their depth but out to crack the case.

Long review short for our friends who no longer wear wooden shoes, “Het is rot.”

Jandino Asporaat is Ramon, a “cut these people some slack” CSO who’s inclined to let little old dog ladies off the hook for not picking up after their pets and think the best of teen truants who are already mixed-up with the wrong crowd.

He’s got the department de-escalation speech memorized. He’d better, because all he’s armed with is pepper spray, a live-streaming bodycam and a “tiny little flashlight” (in Dutch with subtitles, or dubbed into English) to defend himself.

Yeah, he’s disrespected. The locals call his kind “Smurfs” and “Paw Patrol” thanks to their uniforms, their do-gooder indulgence of miscreants and their powerlessness. Hell, Ramon’s even mugged at one point.

His younger half-brother (Yannick Jozefzoon) is the one living up to their dead hero-cop father’s tradition. Kevin tries to indulge his sibling’s dream of a teen center to keep kids on his beat out of trouble by contributing a billiards table.

But Kevin’s the one involved in stakeouts and dangerous work. It’s made more dangerous by having a reckless, swaggering partner, Jack (Werner Kolf). Their coke-smuggling stakeout on the docks gets Kevin killed. His bungling gets Jack demoted to bottom level of the police heirarchy. And naturally, Jack’s new “partner” is the half-brother of the undercover cop killed right in front of him.

Not that anybody’s telling Ramon this.

Jack’s two-fisted, dive-right-in approach to even this level of “ticket or no ticket” policing will never work as a CSO. And he can’t muscle his way back onto Kevin’s murder case. Ramon has to be pushed and pushed before he’ll get worked-up enough to try and punish his brother’s killer.

The scattered laughs come from Ramon’s bend-over-backwards decency. He interrogates teen suspects by beating himself up while handcuffed to one. He’s quick to apologize, slow to anger and kind of the model “almost cop” that Jack’s detective chief (Ramona Vrede, fed-up and funny) advises him to treat “like slow toddlers or something.”

The screenplay takes the time to set up Ramon’s squad as “types” — the exhibitionist/woman-repellent hulk, the conspiracy nut, the Turk whose solution to every problem is “soup” and others. But precious little is done with that set-up.

American viewers may get a kick out of how “nice” and polite Dutch police are compared to the armor-plated hotheads the U.S. is famous for.

But getting comedy out of a Kevin Hart “type” (Asporaat, who is related to one of the screenwriters) paired-up with an Ice Cube (closer to Idris Elba) “type” proves a lot more difficult than you’d hope.

Hart’s screeching way with a line and the faces he makes made “Ride Along” work in ways “Almost Cops” never does.

We can guess who is doing what and who will turn out to be pulling the strings the moment we meet those characters.

“Almost Cops” winds up as almost a buddy comedy, and certainly not one that works.

Rating: TV-MA, bloody violence, profanity

Cast: Jandino Asporaat, Werner Kolf,
Florence Vos Weeda, Ramona Vrede and Yannick Jozefzoon

Credits: Directed by Gonzalo Fernandez Carmona, scripted by Kenneth Asporaat, Joost Reijmers and Thomas van der Ree. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:36

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Movie Preview: What horrors await the chopper crash survivor from “The Occupant?”

Posted on July 11, 2025 by Roger Moore

Ella Balinska stars, Hugo Keijzer directs, and they cut a damned creepy trailer out of it.

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Documentary Review — “Angelheaded Hipster: The Songs of Marc Bolan and T. Rex”

Posted on July 11, 2025 by Roger Moore

Seems like we’ve just about had enough time to forget singer-songwriter-provocateur Marc Bolan and his band T. Rex, when along comes another reminder that “Oh yeah, he was a big deal.”

All it takes is a Mitsubishi sports car commercial, a Robert Palmer & Band cover or any of the some 200 movies and TV episodes that have featured “Bang a Gong (Get it On),” “Twentieth Century Boy” or “Children of the Revolution” — including the Aussie film “Children of the Revolution” — and it all comes back.

Anarchy and androgyny, funk and glam, poodle curls and eye shadow, idol to teen and pre-teen girls, legit rock guitarist, best-selling poet and iconoclastic trixter — Bolan represented all that and more, a rock star who innovated and launched glam, appreciated, embraced and popularized punk (via his music TV show in the UK) and made noise in disco, a performer who “played a part” and then moved on to the next thing before the rest of the culture did.

“Angelheaded Hipster” is thus the perfect title for a documentary appreciation of the music and lyrics of a singular talent who surfed music culture’s ever-shifting waves better than just about anybody. Even the changeling David Bowie, a longtime friend, admitted Bolan got to glam first, grasped punk ahead of the curve and generally went his own way, much as Bowie himself did — with The Thin White Duke often playing catchup to the mercurial Marc.

Ethan Silverman’s film — about the making of a tribute/cover LP of Bolan’s tunes performed by everyone from U2 to Macy Gray, Joan Jett to Nick Cave — is an exhulant celebration of the music that skips over the life and world and biography that made him, which has been covered in other docs over the decades.

Mark Feld took up music, dabbled in modeling and became — like Bowie — a quintessential “Mod” in the British 1960s. And then he became Marc Bolan, joining one band, then beginning T.Rex with just a bongo player as accompaniment, a “rock star” who “couldn’t yet afford a band,” as an earlier producer notes in “Angelheaded Hipster.”

We see U2 deconstruct and reconstruct “Bang a Gong” as they cover it. Ringo Starr marvels at the curious (polyphonic) rhythms of Bolan’s brilliantly arranged, engineered and recorded records. Elton John and Ringo remember working in the studio with Bolan as he took Elvis era rockabilly and upended it, watch Jett and Cave and Maria McKee and Beth Orton and Kesha cover this and that and hear Macy Gray‘s Bob Marley-influenced interpretation of “Children of the Revolution.”

Ringo has a laugh at the fact that knowing Bolan at his pop/rock peak, the thing that mattered to the man the most was that his book of “Tolkienesque” poetry made him the best selling poet in England. Def Leppard lead singer Joe Elliott then trots out his copy of that book, and a childhood, line-by-line transcription of it that he wrote out as a tween.

There’s archival footage of Bowie paying tribute to his friend and rival in interviews and on stage, where he’d tear through “Twentieth Century Boy” whenever he toured with a band that could handle it. His tale of the day the two met (they shared management) is hilarious.

Former teen rock journalist turned filmmaker Cameron Crowe recalls interviewing Bolan in his “wounded bravado” moment where he wasn’t catching on in America, and he was done with “the makeup” and the “glam” back in Britain, where it had made him famous.

And Bolan himself is seen and heard, in playful interviews and hosting a ’70s TV series that broke punk acts (Billy Idol worships him) and kept Bolan relevant just as his own music was evolving out of the shtick that made pubescent girls scream.

“Angelheaded Hipster” serves up truth in advertising, not just in its mod-model to glam rock star and beyond career arc, but in its “The Songs of Marc Bolan and T. Rex” subtitle. Every artist appearing here takes a shot at re-imagining or at least re-appreciating the dense lyrics (Bolan referenced Dylan when talking about his lyrical ambitions), funky arrangements and guitar-driven “spooky” drama or joy in his tunes.

And if nothing else, this film puts a face, a mind and a hairstyle behind all those tunes you hear in “Longlegs” (three songs by Bolan), “Ghosted,” “Death Proof” or “Scott Pilgrim vs. the World.”

Rating: unrated, nudity, profanity

Cast: Marc Bolan, Elton John, Gloria Jones, Macy Gray, Maria McKee, Ringo Starr, David Bowie, Hal Willner, Rolan Bolan, Joan Jett, Lucinda Williams, Kesha, Nick Cave, Billy Idol, The Edge, Beth Orton and Cameron Crowe.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Ethan Silverman. A Greenwich Entertainment (Aug, 8) release.

Running time: 1:39

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Movie Review: Gunn takes his shot at “Superman”

Posted on July 11, 2025 by Roger Moore

Not using a “real” dog as Krypto, the superdog, was as understandable as it was unfortunate.

James Gunn’s take on “Superman” has a CGI version of a dog he’s owned as an antic, overeager but always-hits-his-mark digital sidekick.

It’s got jokes, a welcome light touch. Hell, it’s got Nathan Fillion as The Green Lantern. You laughed the minute you read that, I’ll wager.

David Corenswet of “Twisters” and TV’s “We Own This City” proves an inspired choice for the Man of Steel, and “Marvelous Mrs. Maisel’s” Rachel Brosnahan pretty much channels Margot Kidder as Lois Lane.

But cub reporter Jimmy Olsen (Skyler Gisondo)? He’s a player. Nicholas Hoult’s Muskovite turn as villainous Lex Luthor brags about “brains over brawn” to figure out how to best Superman, and we know he’s just not that smart.

The film is a cluttter of characters and collection of plot points that don’t add up to anything resembling a compelling narrative.

It’s gimmicky, from casting Bradley Cooper and an actress (Angela Sarafyan) who looks just enough like Lady Gaga to make you do a Warner Brothers squint, to parking Frank Grillo in his perma-Brillo stubble as enforcer Rick Flagg Sr., in charge of arresting our Superman, who needs to start thinking about the “consequences” of his high-handed “Metahuman” actions, interfering in human affairs — wars and whatnot.

“You didn’t read me my rights.”

Famous players such as Pom Klementieff and Michael Rooker “play” the CGI robots who tend to Superman’s wounds in his Antarctic Fortress of Solitude. But of course only master robot voice actor Alan Tudyck has any lines.

Fillion’s Green Lantern is the face of the Justice Gang, a privately financed force independent of Superman (Isabela Merced is Hawkgirl, Edi Gathegi is a droll Mister Terrific). And no, they didn’t focus group that “name” before settling on it.

This Superman is a lot less omnipotent. This Superman has supervillains and fake news TV opinionaters arrayed against him. This Superman is definitely in love with Lois Lane.

I like the fact that Gunn chose to join this saga “in progress,” as it were. This isn’t an origin story. This is about Superman losing his first fight, coping with the consequences of interfering in a war between fictional Russian Federation (ish) “states” that Luthor has taken sides in.

The movie’s politics have conservatives snowflaking out. Superman is an “alien,” an immigrant locked in a private prison that isn’t hidden in El Salvador or wherever, but in a “pocket universe” that Luthor can access. Torture and murder are common currency in this metaverse jail.

Superman’s the victim of “monkey bot” online disparagement, which has trashed his rep. Luckily, Jimmy Olsen has an ex (Sara Sampaio) influencer/girlfriend to Luthor who feeds Jimmy tips about what the amoral, heartless DOGE-ish tech bros are up to.

The plot is all over the place, the villains kind of amorphous and just generally “against” the idea of a Superman and there just isn’t enough Fillion and Gathegi or enough jokes outside of those jokers to get the picture over the hump.

Super-dupe cracks one just as he’s about to “Up, up and AWAY” (No, he doesn’t say that. Dammit.).

“Hey buddy, eyes up here.”

It’s all pleasant enough between the generic super-being brawls, which aren’t impressive enough to avoid the label “sleep-inducing. You just know the reporters will struggle to clear the guy’s name, his family will remind him of who he is and the damned digital dog will play “Fetch,” to the advantage of Mr. “Truth, Justice and the American Way.”

Heck, maybe that’s why the snowflakes are complaining that the picture’s “too woke.” It’s got a guy who stands for all three of those, a guy who loves dogs and whom dogs love. They ought to be “triggered.” If there’s a point to Mr. Gunn’s “Superman” movie, that might be it.

Rating: PG-13, violence, “action” and lots of profanity

Cast: David Corenswet, Rachel Brosnahan, Nicholas Hoult, Edi Gathegi, Isabela Merced, Skyler Gisondo, Wendell Pierce, Sara Sampaio, Mikaela Hoover, Beck Bennett, Zlatko Buric, Bradley Cooper, Frank Grillo, Neva Howell, Pruitt Taylor Vince, Alan Tudyck and Nathan Fillion.

Credits: Scripted and directed by James Gunn, based on the DC Comics. A Warner Bros. release.

Running time: 2:09

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Documentary Preview: Remembering a “Twentieth Century Boy” and “Angel headed Hipster”  Marc Bolan of T. Rex

Posted on July 10, 2025 by Roger Moore

Bang a gong, get it on, Groovers. August 8.

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