Wait - I *haven't* started a 2024 Movies thread? Well, I have now!

[RodeoSchro]

BLACK DOVES, WHICH I'M WRITING BECAUSE IF I DON'T, BAD THINGS WILL HAPPEN IN MY MIND

"Black Doves" is a monstrosity. There - I've used "monstrosity" in both parts, so you know I'm serious about it. But what makes "Black Doves" a monstrosity? I'll tell you, because that's what I get paid to do.

I do get paid, don't I?

No matter. "Black Doves" is about a horrible woman who solves all her emotional and mental difficulties by smoking a cigarette. And actually, nothing ever gets solved so we know right off the bat that Keira Knightly and whoever created this crap are nothing but useful idiots for Big Tobacco.

This series was created so Keira Knightly and her friends could sell cigarettes.

Do you need more? Because there is a lot more.

OK - the Black Doves are a group of female spies/assassins/terrorists who are led by a woman who - and this isn't easy to say but man oh man is it right on the money - anyway, if there ever was a character that needed killing, it's this lady. Her name is Reed. She is horrible.

The Black Doves are British but their services are sold to the highest bidder. Yep - if someone needs some spying or needs someone killed, the Black Doves will do it. Even if it means they are operating against Britain. They are not loyal to their country in any way, shape or form.

Again - at the heart of it, the Black Doves are terrorists. Or traitors. Or both. Especially both.

You see, Knightly is married to a dude who is England's Minister of Defense. Reed set it up so that Knightly could meet him, seduce him, and then marry him because Reed knew this guy would be the Prime Minister at some point.

Knightly is his wife and the mother of their twins. She also passes on whatever secret defense information she can gather to Reed, who then sells it to the highest bidder. Said bidder is clearly not England, because it was their information in the first place. So there's no other word that describes Knightly and her group other than, or better than, "TRAITORS".

And they are the heroines of this insipid series.

Knightly - being a traitor with no morals - was boinking some other idiot on the side when that idiot and three of his friends got assassinated. A whole bunch of stupid stuff happens over the following four or five episodes and then we learn that the idiot she was boinking was himself a spy. For who, we don't know nor do we care.

If you watch this, you're going to root for everyone to get killed. Keira Knightly deserves a bullet to the brain. Her boss, Reed, deserves a death via extended torture. The Black Doves's triggerman-for-hire should be drawn and quartered. His boss deserves to have all the damn cigarettes she smokes stuffed down her Marlboro-infected throat.

They are all horrible people and there is absolutely no one worth rooting for. Which, as we all know, is a complete and total violation of RodeoSchro's First Rule of Movie Making, which also applies to anything else that purports to have a protagonist. Said protagonist must be likable, or your story will bomb. This is an immutable artistic law, as we will see in my next review.

However, this review is over. Don't watch "Black Doves".

 

[RodeoSchro]

THE INCREDIBLE BURT WONDERSTONE
December 25, 2024

A pox on YouTube! What made its algorithm think that this would be a good movie from which to pull the only decent scene and put it on my feed?

A pox on YouTube commenters! Especially those that said, "This is a hidden gem!"

It is NOT a hidden gem. It is not a gem of any kind, hidden or otherwise.

I bet you already know what this movie's first of many problems is. Yep! Burt Wonderstone is not likable. He's a self-centered a-hole. At no point in the movie will you do anything except feel good when bad things happen to him, because that's what The Incredible Burt Wonderstone deserves.

Steve Carell plays Burt Wonderstone, a magician who was bullied as a child and discovered magic due to no reason that had anything whatsoever to do with being bullied. Then he meets Young Steve Buscemi at junior high and they form a bond which becomes a magic act. They end up as the headliners at Bally's in Las Vegas for ten years.

Carell is absolutely putrid. He is mean, rude, egotistical and sees women only as things to boink. When Jim Carrey shows up and takes over the magic world via his streetwise guerrilla video style, Carell's act suddenly doesn't seem interesting any more. People stop going to his show, which causes Carell distress because the pool of potential boinking mates dwindles to nothing.

It causes James Galdofini distress too because he owns Bally's and he likes making money, not losing it. So he fires Carell and Buscemi.

But for some reason, he doesn't hire the new King Of Magic Jim Carrey to fill that theater. In fact, we never learn who or what Gandolfini replaces Carell and Buscemi with.

Predictably, Carell blew all his money on stupid stuff and ends up doing card tricks at a retirement home. Buscemi goes to some far-off country, where they don't have food or clean water but they do have some plant that if they're exposed to its smoke, they pass out for one hour. Buscemi brings Operation Presto! to their village. It turns out that the villagers need food and clean water more than they need magic, so Operation Presto! is a giant failure.

Again predictably, Carell grows as a human being, realizes he's been a jerk all of his adult life, and makes up with Buscemi and some of the women he'd boinked.

Then they go to Regionals, also known as The Audition To Be The Main Act At James Gandolfini's New Casino And Hotel. Of course Jim Carrey is there too but Carell and Buscemi have the show-stopper to end all show-stoppers. They are going to make the audience disappear. And they do!

They do that by gassing them with the smoke from that plant in the village that Buscemi flopped in.

They (1) throw - yes, literally drag and throw - the audience into some trucks; (2) take them to another place; (3) seat them in the same order they were at the original theater; (4) watch them all wake up at exactly the same time and realize they are now at some open-air location; (5) say "TA DAAAA!"; (6) gas them again; (7) repeat the dragging and throwing of bodies into trucks; (8) place them back in their original theater seats; (9) wait for everyone to wake up at exactly the same time again and realize they are back at the theater; and (10) finish with another "TA DAAAA!"

Carell's character is such a bad human that you don't feel good about his "redemption", if you can call gassing people twice and mistreating them "redemption".

The moral of the story is - don't trust YouTube or the people that comment on movie scenes.

Speaking of YouTube, we'll end this One Rabbit Pulled Out Of A Hat out of Five Rabbits Pulled Out Of A Hat movie with what I'm sure is a much better magic show than anything The Incredible Burt Wonderstone could have pulled off and yes - that IS a young Mikey Day:

​

 

[RodeoSchro]

THE BIKERIDERS
December 29, 2024

It's time for the first-ever End Of Year Awards For Stupidity!

And only one movie qualifies - "The Bikeriders". This does NOT mean this was the stupidest movie of the year (that award goes to the "Roadhouse" disaster) but man oh man are there a lot of stupid things about it. Let's hand things over to Eunice a/k/a The Bad Conversationalist, to hand out the coveted Stupies.

"Thank you Mr. RodeoSchro, I am so honored to announce these awards especially since we are on the internet and since the internet is a series of tubes or so I have heard, no one will know how many glasses of peach schnaps I might drink, that is if I even drink any at all but you need to know there are some bad influences in the room with me and of course I'm talking about the ladies of our Koffee Klatch but don't worry because none of them have seen this movie and frankly I wish I hadn't either but I watched it as a personal favor to Mr. RodeoSchro and God knows why but God does know that Mr. RodeoSchro owes me a giant favor so break open the peach schnapps girls because it's time to hand out some Stupies!

"The first Stupie is called The Worst Attempt At Trying To Sound Like James Cagney Stupie and it goes to Tom Hardy who, as we all know, is a very fine actor and even played a rabbi or something like that on that 'Peaky Blinders' show but in this movie he has decided that not enough people ever heard James Cagney speak and so he tries to rectify that injustice by using a really really bad James Cagney accent but Mr. RodeoSchro is wrong because that's not a James Cagney accent, it's an Edward G. Robinson accent and I know this because my Horace is a giant Edward G. Robinson fan so I know my Edward G. Robinson but no matter because Tom Hardy's accent is very bad and that's not like Tom Hardy.

"The next award is the What In The Sam Hill Were You Thinking About Stupie which also goes to Tom Hardy but Mr. RodeoSchro says this one is really a Stupie for the rules of the motorcycle club which for some reason gave any member the right to challenge Tom Hardy to a fight and the winner gets to lead the club which if you think about it, isn't much of a prize because these guys are all top-flight losers and who wants to be known as the King of the Losers but I guess at least one guy did because he challenged Tom Hardy in a very friendly manner over some minor disagreement and so Tom Hardy asked the very nice guy if their fight was going to be fists or knives and it's here that Mr. RodeoSchro points out that the loser in a fist fight gets a bloody nose or something but the loser in a knife fight gets to be dead and why would you ever want to have a knife fight with someone you consider a brother and besides that, how many knife fights had Tom Hardy been in before this and for that matter, well - let's go to the next Stupie.

"The third award is what Mr. RodeoSchro calls the Man Are These Guys Lame Stupie and he's right, these guys are really lame all the way to the point that the worst crime any of them ever committed was running seven stop lights in some sleepy Midwestern town and you know what, now that I think about it this movie could have been set in my sleepy Midwestern town because we do have seven stoplights and always have as far as I know but having seven stoplights makes us the metropolis of the Tri-County Area because all the other sleepy Midwestern towns in the Tri-County Area have no more than five stoplights and also none of those sleepy Midwestern towns have ever been the three-times defending state champions in Girls Field Hockey and we would have won four years in a row but Mary Halberstam had to leave the county just before Regionals and didn't come back for nine months during which time we lost the Girls Field Hockey state championship to those hicks over in Stephensland, why I have it on good authority that their liquor establishment doesn't have peach schnapps and how backwards can you get except we don't mention that to Mary Halberstam because when she came back she had little Thornton with her and I'm not saying anything but he has the exact same forehead as that ruffian Billy Hanrahan who would have fit right in with the losers in this movie.

"OK, two more to go and the next award is called the I Guess It's OK To Murder Someone In Sleepy Midwestern Towns Because That's What Happened Stupie and what else can I say except that IS what happened to Tom Hardy, getting murdered I mean, because he got challenged by some punk kid from another city and Tom Hardy of course asked the punk kid if he wanted fists or knives and this punk kid said knives and wouldn't you know it, that punk kid actually brought a gun to a knife fight and shot Tom Hardy dead and while Tom Hardy was the King of the Losers, he was also the only loser that had a job and also had a wife and also had two daughters so while Tom Hardy might not have been a pillar of his sleepy Midwestern community like Horace and I are, at least he was gainfully employed and not living in sin, so you would think his murder would be handled professionally by our professional sleepy Midwestern town police force, who can be quite wide awake if they need to be, but as we see at the end of the movie the punk kid was not only not arrested, he was made the new King of the Losers and allowed to ride his motorcycle with impunity. really?

"The last Stupie is the Stupie for You Went From Elvis Presley To This?!? and it's given to someone named Austin Something-Or-Other, let's see what the Google machine says, oh yes this young man's name is Austin Butler and as it turns out, he started as a kid star on a Disney show or whatever and then scowled his way to the big time and I say he scowled his way because judging from this movie, all he can do is scowl and try to look cool but unlike the goofy lady who fell for him in this movie, if he scowled or brooded or moped or look pensive at me, I can tell you I would not fall for him at all unless, of course, he offered me some peach schnapps because the way to a lady's heart is through the peach schnapps hole and now I really want some peach schnapps so Loretta, would you pour me a glass of peach schnapps and - wait, what do you mean we're all out, that's impossible, did you girls drink all our peach schnapps because if you did, that would be so rude since you didn't offer me any peach schnapps and it's Sunday and the liquor places are closed and now I'm going to have to dip into my secret stash of schnapps so you all have to excuse me but it doesn't matter because I've given out all the Stupies this stupid movie has earned. Thank you and good night".