It's not surprising that we'd start to get a sense of the Coen Brothers' respective sensibilities once they started making movies separately, but I didn't expect it to be such a sharp contrast between Joel doing a Shakespearean tragedy in black and white and Ethan doing a campy lesbian road movie. While I think they're probably better together, I'd be fine with them just going off in these opposite directions for the rest of their careers if they wanted to. Drive-Away Dolls does not rise to to the level of my favorite Coen comedies like The Hudsucker Proxy or Burn After Reading, but it's pretty fun and Geraldine Viswanathan is very quickly become one of the best comedic actresses we've got. A couple weeks ago I worked with Annie Gonzalez, and I thought she was really charming and beautiful. Then a few days later I watched Drive-Away Dolls, not realizing that she has a sex scene in the first five minutes of the movie. 

It's kind of confusing that two movies released in the past year, one by David Fincher and one by John Woo, are both called The Killer. But then, Woo is remaking one of his Hong Kong movies from the '80s, so he certainly had the title first. It's fun watching Nathalie Emmanuel play an action hero, she's pretty good at it, although I've never been that big on Woo's style. I laughed out loud at a couple of particularly over-the-top flourishes in the big climactic fight scene and was weirded out by the almost purple shade of all the fake blood in the movie, and the supporting cast was mostly a dud. 

I think like most people, the idea of police abusing civil forfeiture makes really angry, and this movie seizes on that emotion really brilliantly and you just watch this badass former Marine get revenge on a corrupt small town police department for 2 hours after they steal the cash he was going to use to bail his cousin out of jail. This very easily could've been fun B-movie pulp, but Jeremy Saulnier elevates it to a genuinely good movie. 

I'll love Paul Feig forever for creating "Freaks & Geeks" but he eventually on a pretty good streak of directing features as well and Spy and A Simple Favor are modern classics in my personal canon. Jackpot! is not his best, but it does star two former rappers whose names rhyme with each other, John Cena and Awkwafina, so that's fun. It's about a murderous lottery in the near future, its working title was Grand Death Lotto, and the screenplay is by a guy who's mostly written for video games -- not a good sign if your movie probably started as a pitch for a video game. But it got some genuine laughs out of me as an edgier, more violent Rat Race / It's A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, Cena gets some great lines. 

I put this one one day as background noise while writing because everyone on the internet was hating on it and, yeah, pretty bad. I respect Glenn Close doing something besides prestige pictures at this point in her career, but this wasn't the right move. 

Another Netflix movie that I could tell was gonna suck that I put on one day as background noise. It's almost a shame this premise wasn't used as a straight-up parody of YA dystopia Maze Runner type stuff because it's hilariously stupid. 

I'm not too invested in how MCU movies perform or why at this point, but I definitely suspect that they should've notched a second Captain Marvel solo movie before doing a movie with her leading a team. That said, Iman Vellani is totally the best thing about The Marvels, she's a lot more entertaining as the over-excited teen sidekick here than she was as the protagonist of "Ms. Marvel." And in some ways this was a better movie than Captain Marvel, I never really liked all the Skrulls stuff. 

Last month I published a Baltimore Banner piece about Little Feat's 1974 stint in Maryland, which mentions Lowell George and Linda Ronstadt's on-air performance on WHFS. And soon after, I got an e-mail from the director of this excellent documentary about the station, which features a couple members of Little Feat (including the late Paul Barrere, who was interviewed for the film before he passed away). I grew up on the later alternative rock incarnation of the station, 99.1 HFS, but this movie is about the original freeform station that broadcast out of Bethesda in the '70s, and it's really fascinating, love hearing the backstories of DJs I've listened to on local radio for ages like Weasel and Damien Einstein. Check out the official site for the film for ways to watch it. 

Demi Lovato co-directed and narrated this Hulu documentary that really lets former child stars just tell their stories and delves into the sordid history of how kids in show business in a way that's very sensitive and empathetic and not sensationalized. A lot of the movie is just Lovato sitting down with Drew Barrymore or Christina Ricci or Raven-Symone and sharing stories with each other and comparing notes, really humanizing the issues. Kenan Thompson is often kind of held up as an example of a former child star who seemed to come out of it unscathed and transition into a great career as an adult, but he wears sunglasses for his entire interview, speaks in a lower register than the voice he usually uses while performing, and opens up about how his family got scammed by someone who left him broke around the time his Nickelodeon run ended. 

 

You never know if a documentary about a superstar's sideman is going to be kind of boring or sad, but I really enjoyed this, it gave me a renewed appreciation for both Stevie Van Zandt's role in Bruce Springsteen's career and all the cool things he's done outside the E Street Band. Van Zandt sits backwards on a chair like a cool teacher for his entire interview for the movie, which is funny, but it's a good watch. Home Alone director Chris Columbus is a talking head in both Child Star and this, and it's funny to see him in two documentaries released a few months apart where he looks completely different (full beard in Child Star, clean shaven in Disciple), I almost didn't realize it was the same guy. 

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