Tag: review

Jay’s Quick Take: Cabaret

A revisionist movie review.

“Cabaret”. It’s a classic, according to “industry experts”. It’s on every “Top 1000” / “See This Before You Die” list, and all the reviews on Plex have that little “tomatoe” icon. Director Bob Fosse is known for more than his four main theatrical features, from Cabaret-on, although at least two of those movies are actual, confirmed personal favorites (full disclosure: I haven’t seen “All That Jazz” yet). Shouldn’t “Cabaret”, then, be worth 5000-words-or-more? Surely? Meh. Surely it’s been done.

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Jay’s Take: On Deadly Ground

A revisionist movie review.

“You wanna know who he is? Try this: delve down into the deepest bowels of your soul. Try to imagine the ultimate fucking nightmare. And that won’t come close to this son of a bitch when he gets pissed.”

– Michael Caine re: Steven Seagal

Let’s talk. Aside from the man himself, do any of us REALLY KNOW Steven Seagal? Sure, NOW he’s the schlub who can disarm a pistol-toting goon faster than my Mazda can reach top-speed uphill in eco-mode – who has private “line readings” with his co-actresses (albeit allegedly) in expensive hotel rooms in cities whose elite still see the man as the mainstream movie star he was 40-years-ago – but just WHO is he? No one understands the “mythos” of Seagal better than Seagal himself. And for this review, it’ll be important that we make this distinction now, at the beginning, because -SHOCK- “On Deadly Ground” is up for re-evaluation, and (surprise!) it’s really, really good.

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Jay’s Take: House of Gucci

A spoiler-heavy & deeply-subjective movie review.

Ridley Scott, what are we to do with you? Guy’s movies consistently underperform at the box office and yet he still keeps pumping them out, and studios are happy to let him. Why is that? We’ve all heard the story about when Kevin Spacey was edited out of “All the Money in the World” and Scott reshot his scenes with Christopher Plummer in one week (we also heard about how Michelle Williams was paid less than a HUNDREDTH of what Mark Wahlberg was to come back but, forget that, because Ridley Scott doesn’t have time for your bullshit). The only reasonable explanation I can come up with is that his are the ultimate in money-laundering fronts: high-class picture-films with sky-high production values that add legitimacy to the Lizard People’s ever-domineering hold over the global sex-slave market. Or the Big Studios’ hold over the encroaching streaming & independent markets. Plus, he’ll shoot it for 20-bucks on a weekend: fast, AND cheap! Look, any idiot can make an “important” film on his iPhone now, but it takes a serious “auteur” like Scott to make an “important” film with unlimited resources at his disposal and STILL have it turn out to be plodding garbage that no one is interested in paying money to go see.

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