Remembering 2020, My Fifteenth Year Of Blogging

John Lennon said it best: “Life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans.” I can’t think of a more fitting epitaph for 2020.

When the year began, my father was reeling from his hospital stay in the last three days of 2019. He came into the ER on December 29th with one ailment and came out on New Year’s Eve with two more. He was so exhausted from the experience he went to bed early with my mom and didn’t ring in the new year at midnight.

The septic kidney stone, one of the most painful things he’s ever experienced, proved very stubborn indeed. In our local medical facility, he underwent his first surgery to get it reduced in size. After a couple of months of agony that would ebb and flow constantly (some days were more excruciating than others), and once the infection had disappeared he underwent a much needed second surgery. Now even tinier, he finally peed it out. We were all very relieved.

While being examined in the ER (after two hours of waiting to be called), he underwent a blood test which determined his blood sugar levels were at 20. He’s now a Type 2 Diabetic and has made long overdue changes to his eating habits and lifestyle which still astounds me. If only he would check his levels.

All of the stress he endured during his hospital stay gave him a third ailment – shingles – which he neglected to tell us right away because my mother and I are excessive worriers. When his new physician met with him for the first time and saw those large red scabs on his legs, she wouldn’t touch him. She prescribed these rather large pills to ease his suffering. He said it was the most painful thing he’s ever experienced, which, in the aftermath of the septic kidney stone, is rather alarming. My dad is the strongest guy I know and for him to have felt as vulnerable as he did at the end of 2019 and in the early months of 2020 was sobering in many ways.

When I was woken up on December 29th last year I was not expecting to spend 6 hours of my life on next to no food concerned for his well-being wondering what the hell was going on. What I really wanted to do was write. What my parents wanted to do was their laundry.

“Life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans.”

As a result of all this uncertainty and unease, contemplative pieces that would traditionally be posted under more relaxed conditions during the Christmas and New Year’s holidays would be delayed. My annual review of this website’s output, once again divided into two separate entries, originally scheduled for New Year’s Eve 2019, surfaced a little later on January 2 & 3, 2020. I was so distressed about my dad I abandoned my usual good and bad moments of the year pieces which I had only half-heartedly started anyway. I didn’t even bother starting this year’s editions.

The last of my first wave of History Of The Mystery Track stories, a second one about Nirvana originally scheduled for late December as well, followed a couple of days later. I’m so grateful to have spent those final months of 2019 reviving an old passion of mine from my younger years. I was thrilled to salvage a concept first introduced in my college radio series and extensively reworked here in a series of thoroughly researched essays. (The one about Britney Spears & The Backstreet Boys got some unexpected traffic late this year when a fan posted it in a comment forum on breatheheavy.com. It even got a couple of likes!) Unfortunately, a series of circumstances has prevented further progress. But I’m still hopeful that another batch of offerings will be available in the future.

The second night my dad was in the hospital I watched my last movie of 2019. Angel Has Fallen, the threequel to Olympus Has Fallen and London Has Fallen, is just as bad as its jingoistic predecessors. Having already written assessments of the earlier installments, I threw together another one for number three and it first appeared here the same day I posted the last of the two year-in-blogging retrospectives.

Although I screened fewer movies in 2020 (178 compared to 238 in 2019), I managed to present 45 individual reviews which may be the most I’ve done in a single year in the blogging era.

There were critiques of horror films like Blade II, the Rabid remake, Amityville 3D, Hell Fest, Of Unknown Origin, Hostel Part II, The Craft, the Psycho remake, Cujo, Sweet Sixteen, The Blob remake, Motel Hell and the recent feminist reworking of The Invisible Man.

There were my takes on comedies like Sydney White, She’s The Man, Superstar, Leave It To Beaver, Beauty Shop, Barbershop: The Next Cut, Bucky Larson: Born To Be A Star, The House Bunny, Bingo, Doctor Detroit, Green Card, The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Trainwreck, Knocked Up, The Girl Next Door, Hot Tub Time Machine and Hot Tub Time Machine 2.

I reviewed the science fiction films Passengers, John Carter and Rampage; thrillers like Fatal Attraction, The Da Vinci Code, The Hunt For Red October and Edge Of Darkness; the Clint Eastwood drama Gran Torino; three quarters of the Billy Jack franchise: The Born Losers, The Trial Of Billy Jack and Billy Jack Goes To Washington; and three documentaries: Justin Bieber: Never Say Never, Justin Bieber’s Believe and Revolution.

I don’t usually get a lot of direct feedback from people whose work I write about but shortly after tweeting out a link to my long review of The Trial Of Billy Jack, one of the film’s stars, Michael Bolland, who played the abuse victim Danny, sent me this nice tweet. Now in his 40s, he’s a stand-up comedian. Good to know he’s still around and very positive. Thanks again, Mike!

Speaking of Twitter, I am very tired of being suspended for doing absolutely nothing wrong. Two years ago, my account was frozen because their seriously flawed algorithms wrongly believed my exuberant retweeting about the 2018 US midterm elections could only be performed by a bot. After angrily complaining, they immediately apologized and reinstated me.

But when it happened again this year during the US federal election, they refused to do the right thing and locked me out for an annoyingly prolonged period, 10 days in total. As the world held its breath wondering if creepy Joe Biden would dethrone creepy Donald Trump for the Presidency (he did, four days after election day which Trump has refused to accept or fully acknowledge), I silently seethed not being able to tweet my own thoughts in real time along with everybody else on the service.

So I vented on here instead. Five days later, despite repeatedly complaining to no avail, nothing had changed. So I vented again. Realizing that they were never going to unlock my account from their end, I figured out a clever way to do it myself. And it worked. I’m grateful they’re none the wiser about it. Honestly, I should not have had to find a workaround when I should not have been suspended in the first place. I was lucky. Sadly, many others have been wrongfully banished from the site on a more permanent basis. (Bring back Barrett Brown.)

I’m deeply appreciative of my Twitter journo pals Gina Tron and Scarlett Harris, who I reached out to during the lockout, for being so understanding and supportive during my unnecessary absence. (I had seemingly lost all of my followers which thankfully was only temporary.) Despite being respected writers, and very sweet people, Twitter didn’t listen to them, either. None of this would’ve been necessary if the powers that be would just verify my account already. Isn’t writing 10 Huffington Post articles enough for you people?

In the midst of all this nonsense, my grandmother died. She hadn’t been well for some time. Having just turned 99 in October (because of her advanced-age dementia, she thought she made it to the century mark which wasn’t such a bad thing for her to believe in the end), she suddenly collapsed in the presence of a PSW and was rushed to the ER in Welland where she spent her remaining years with my aunt & uncle who were taking a much needed coffee break when they got the call. She was given no more than 2 days to live.

The day after she was checked in, my other aunt drove my mom to go see her for the last time. But as soon as they entered the building, they were told she had already gasped her final breath. When they were taken to go see her finally, her mouth was wide open, like something out of a horror movie.

Despite terrible eating habits, a longterm smoking addiction she eventually kicked about 30 years ago and a very grumpy demeanour that I only saw some of the time, what got my Grandma in the end was a simple blood clot on her lung. Whenever my mom or her sisters would bring up her questionable, shall we say quirky lifestyle choices, she would always wave off the criticism noting, “I’m still here so I must be doing something right!” It all feels so ironic now.

I’m glad she was in my life for as long as she was. She was kind to me, always spoiling me and her other grandchildren with hugs and kisses and generous gifts. She loved movies and when I started writing reviews in high school, she would always ask my opinions about the latest releases I used to see in my local multiplexes which carried over into college. (As a teen, Grandma was an usherette and actually kept a diary of reviews which is sadly lost. She wasn’t a hoarder of sentimental items, for the most part.)

When she lived with us for 15 years, beginning in 1997, my dad would rent a bunch of movies to watch with her and my mom but after she kept falling asleep through a few, that practice was discontinued. Like myself, she’d rather watch movies on her own. For a time, she even participated in our annual Oscar pool and even won a few pots.

I remember her always buying scratch tickets for each of us on family dinner night on Sundays. Mom always told her she was wasting her money (we never won more than maybe, oh I don’t know, 12 bucks, probably). She was undeterred. She loved the lotteries. But the race track and casinos were her absolute favourites. The constant sound of slot machine ka-chinging must’ve been heaven for her.

When she died that first week in November, we were fortunate to have unusually warm weather for both the visitation and the burial site service which was necessarily restricted to family only. (A proper indoor funeral, which Grandma would’ve preferred, could not happen.) At the visitation, spread out over one afternoon with certain parts of the family limited to their own designated hour, a repeatedly looping photo collage set to light background music featured her in countless photos over the years with all of us. It was delightful.

The funeral was short but moving and funny. I was asked to a be a pallbearer which, for a weak, skinny man, is a difficult fucking job. The casket was heavier than Grandma. But I was honoured to do it with five of my cousins, thankfully most of them stronger than me. She’s resting right next to my grandfather who died of Alzheimer’s 20 years ago. Their plots, far away from where they eventually relocated to, were purchased in the 50s when a traveling salesman gave them the old hard sell and they lived closer to the cemetery.

It was also a gloomy year for millions around the world as the Coronavirus, first detected exactly a year ago in late 2019, would spread rapidly over the course of the next twelve months. Lockdowns and social distancing and mandatory indoor masking by-laws became the norm. So did checking the latest numbers on CNN and Wikipedia. There are now more than 80 million cases worldwide with nearly 2 million gone. But we’ve got vaccinations happening now so there is finally some hope for the new year.

During the first lockdown in my city, my public library was closed for three months in the spring, then reopened for curbside pick-up (you could only get stuff you reserved and you had to book your appointment online in advance) before fully reopening with numerous changes in late July. (We’re currently back in curbside pick-up mode again but at least you can use their computers this time and pick up your stuff whenever.) It was the only difficulty I had during those early days of the crisis, not being inside those wonderful buildings exploring their collections. With a second lockdown now in effect (which should’ve happened two months ago), it looks like we’re in for a long winter.

The darkening mood was perfect for writing poetry. And for a brief moment in time there was a welcome return to rhyming verses and a small but positive response from readers. The most popular poems were The Consequence Of Drive and Mediocre White Man, the latter of which was inspired by a complaint Quillette journalist Jonathan Kay made about this reply to a Robyn Doolittle tweet regarding the monstrous Matt Lauer. Why did Kay delete his response to me, I wonder? Maybe because I retweeted it and liked it and that embarrassed him? Good. The man’s a knob.

Man Of No Substance skewers President-elect Joe Biden and his partisan supporters for pretending he’s some kind of political saviour when his shitty human rights record paved the way for Trump. The Open Door Now Shuts focuses on the dangers of loneliness and sexual repression in the frustrating world of online conversing while Flood Of Anticipation imagines a hypnotic encounter of carnal delights.

No poem I wrote was more prescient than The Coming Rage. After the needless murder of George Floyd during the first lockdown (among other horrifying crimes against Black people), millions of Americans and international citizens collectively marched to protest the growing militarization of the police and its chronic inability and outright refusal to reform its white supremacist origins. And while “Abolish The Police” soon got watered down to “Defund The Police”, the message irritated the right people including the incoming President who stupidly thinks giving well-armed fascists a substantial raise will improve their behaviour. This is only the beginning. If things don’t improve, revolution is inevitable.

Prisoner Of Sympathy was inspired by a falling out I had with someone I once considered a close friend on Twitter. For many years I always comforted her through all her many dramas. There were times she even threatened to quit the site and I convinced her to stay. Despite her ever present neuroses and sudden, unexplained disappearances during our DM exchanges (which she only sometimes apologized for before doing it all over again), I liked talking to her and she liked talking to me.

No subject was off-limits except apparently my own needs and how they weren’t being fulfilled. Suddenly, she questioned my motives even though I wasn’t looking for her to take care of them. For someone whose whole writing career revolved around love and sex, it was an odd, perplexing reaction. I was just frustrated in general which I thought she could relate to on a much smaller scale but she got paranoid and bolted without once again saying good-bye. I apologized needlessly for upsetting her when I did absolutely nothing wrong.

We never spoke again. I gave her a week to reach out – I certainly wasn’t going to do it – but I’ve since blocked her and moved on. Like a number of women I’ve met online over the decades, she turned out to be too toxic and is not missed. What a waste of six years. It’s like someone else I follow on Twitter said a little while ago: they are not your friends. I need to stop learning that lesson the hard way.

Besides railing once again against the unimportant Golden Globes and throwing up all my usual Oscar pieces (predictions, the availability of nominated films on video, and the results on the actual show), I only managed to offer one wrestling piece this year: Three Men Who Survived WrestleMania Retirement Matches. As the pandemic raged on, with the notable exception of Ring Of Honor most pro wrestling companies foolishly carried on without always taking the necessary precautions which inevitably resulted in easily preventable infections.

Watching several WWE pay-per-views on DVD beginning with the scaled-down WrestleMania 36 was a weird, surreal experience. I felt like I was watching a rehearsal instead of the actual show. (The eventual arrival of the silly Thunderdome, reminiscent of Bryan Adams’ Heaven video but with flat screens, in the summer hasn’t been much of a substitute for the absent fans.) Yes, there were some exceptional matches like the three-way ladder match for the tag titles. And it was great to see Drew McIntyre finally get a world title push, but that wasn’t WrestleMania.

The cinematic pairings like the boneyard match with The Undertaker (who finally retired this year) and AJ Styles, and that wacky funhouse encounter between John Cena and Bray Wyatt were not exactly brilliant replacements for traditional matches in front of large, ravenous audiences. With ratings for the increasingly unwatchable Raw and Smackdown going way down (Raw is now generating just a million and a half viewers, a far cry from the eight million it had during the height of the Attitude era), I haven’t been this uninterested in professional wrestling since the mid-1990s. I know the WWE is in rebuild mode now that Cena is a movie star and Roman Reigns has become a Paul Heyman guy, but maybe it’s time for a regime change. And full scale unionization.

For the first time in a decade, The Writings Of Dennis Earl has generated less than 10000 annual hits. Since I stopped writing for HuffPost (they don’t pay, I didn’t sort out their password policy change in time to even submit another entry, and they’ve changed their submission criteria anyways which greatly limited my proposed ideas), page views have declined consistently and precipitously in the last several years. With the 15th anniversary of the original site approaching (I originally debuted on MSN Spaces before moving here in 2010), obviously something has to change.

Paradoxically, hits actually started to increase in the last couple of months so maybe momentum will finally swing in the more positive direction again. Regardless, I still enjoy doing this. I just wish it was possible to reach a wider audience and make a good living at it. The Constanza period lives on.

Until this year, I had never really understood or paid much attention to the Shares statistic because of ignorance (it has nothing to do with stocks and bonds, unfortunately) and for quite a while, I only had as many as 2. But something changed in 2020 and now I have almost 1400. My review of My Boss’ Daughter has gotten the most with 14. Right behind are a couple of Sophia Bush pieces that sandwich an entry from one of my old Winners & Losers series. Most of the rest of the shared pieces are in the single digits.

WordPress only keeps track of links posted on Facebook and Twitter with the former having a slight lead over the latter. Perhaps I should examine this more closely. Who is sharing all of my work? Whoever they are, thank you for all the support. It means a lot. Kinda funny how it all just started happening only recently, though.

Since the start of the WordPress era, this site has generated just over 251,000 page views. Pretty small potatoes, but hey, I’ll take it. While I’m proud of the nearly 1300 postings I’ve put together over the entire run of this site, I wasn’t able to do my usual wide variety of entries this year. (Most of the offerings were movie reviews.) As we continue to survive a terrible global crisis together, here’s hoping I somehow find the motivation and determination to right the ship.

Nothing I wrote this year was a big audience breakout, but the archives continue to generate interest as several Seinfeld trivia pieces finished in the Top 10. And I’m happy some attention was afforded to a few of my History Of The Mystery Track essays. One of the many disappointments this year was not being able to continue on right after that second Nirvana piece. I’m not sure how to continue, frankly, as we enter a new uncertain future. But as long as something excites me and as long as I can figure out a compelling way to express that excitement, this will be the forum to showcase it.

Happy New Year, everyone.

Dennis Earl
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Thursday, December 31, 2020
9:57 p.m.

Leave It To Beaver (1997)

The central gag of Leave It To Beaver is that its young hero is a moron, a gullible dupe, an easy mark.  Make a suggestion, any suggestion, no matter how inane or dangerous, and he’ll go along with it no problem.  There is no wisdom to acquire because the same mistake is repeated again and again.

Many of these dumb pickles he finds himself in would be easily avoided if his older brother Wally didn’t hang around so much with Eddie Haskell, a charmless two-face and a bad influence.  As played by Ken Osmond on the original black and white TV series, he was the only character with an edge.  He also happened to be funny.

But in this shockingly dark and laughless film update, as now played by Adam Zolotin, he’s a future Harvey Weinstein and so goddamn smug.

Enamoured with a cute girl named Karen (Erika Christensen three years before her breakthrough in Traffic), instead of introducing himself and trying to break the ice like a normal person, this little fucker stalks her everywhere she goes.  And he takes photos.  When he gleefully flips through them to show “Wallace”, they look like intrusive paparazzi snaps.  She is not happy to see him which he doesn’t accept. At one point, she even threatens a restraining order. She should’ve filed one after he breaks into her bedroom (she isn’t home at the time) which is thankfully only talked about and not actually shown.

In the end, of course, he’s all talk.  He does all this creepy shit because he actually doesn’t know what to do.  (Osmond, who plays his dad, gives him all kinds of bad ideas that clearly startle him. Why Mr. Haskell is so bitter about women goes unexplored which is probably for the best.) He’s so afraid to talk to her he convinces Wally to do the talking for him.  But Karen prefers him over Edward and there’s a temporary conflict.

Wally, however, will find competition of his own when a returning old boyfriend, Kyle, an even bigger dick, swoops right in on their ice skating date and, as they say on the old Jersey Shore, pulls off a robbery.

Meanwhile, Wally’s dopey younger brother takes one look at a nice bike strategically placed in a storefront window and openly covets it. Instead of simply asking for it for his upcoming birthday he’s convinced by Eddie to go through a charade that would only happen in a movie like this.

Christopher McDonald, so good as the host of 21 in Quiz Show and disappointingly slumming it yet again here, is the dad, Ward Cleaver. He’s an asshole, too, as we learn repeatedly. Eddie instructs Beaver to do his famous ass kissing routine with his father. The best way to do this, he asserts, is to follow in his footsteps and start playing for his school football team. Upon hearing this news, deluded Ward immediately fantasizes about his son becoming a star.

There’s a tiny problem and it’s Beaver himself. He’s the smallest guy on the field. More importantly, however, he’s an idiot. He has no idea what he’s doing. How in the hell does he even make the cut? Are they really that hard up for fresh recruits?

The idea is that if he makes his father proud by playing football, something Ward did during his childhood “sandlot” days, he’ll get the bike, which is exactly what happens. But, let’s be clear, he would’ve gotten it anyway, regardless. Eddie just likes screwing with him.

At any event, Kyle’s brother spots the kid with his most prized possession, shows off some sick tricks and then, inevitably, rides away with it.

It takes a while to confess the truth to Ward and with good reason. He’s not understanding at all. In fact, he blames the kid for being robbed. Comparing his previous fuck-ups (how on earth do you lose a valuable baseball card like that?) is unfair. For once, he’s a victim and not careless. (That bike was getting pilfered no matter what.) At no time does Ward suggest maybe tracking down the culprit instead of scolding Beaver. It’s not exactly hard to find him.

To be fair, he also rags on Wally for not looking after baby bro like he asked him to. He was too busy locking eyes with Karen.

Kyle’s brother, it turns out, isn’t very smart, either. He keeps riding the damn thing all across town unbothered, just begging to be brought down. He inevitably runs into Beaver a number of times but almost always manages to speed away. You know the kid will eventually get it back. (I mean the fateful moment is given away in the trailer.)

But before then, like Eddie, he has to mess with his inferior mind which doesn’t provide much of a challenge. He makes a ridiculous deal with Beaver. See that giant, steaming coffee cup on that brand new cafe that just opened up? Climb up and jump in. See if there really is coffee in there. You do that, you get your bike back.

For a brief moment, Beaver questions the logic. If only he realized he has better options than humiliating himself all over again.

This colour film version of Leave It To Beaver lives in a weird netherworld where it’s clear it’s set in the present but still looks and feels like it’s set in the late 50s. The conceit doesn’t work. It’s like the movie is arguing with itself about what it should be and doesn’t resolve the tension.

Janine Turner’s June dresses exactly like Barbara Billingsley did in the original show (she has a brief, meaningless cameo as an aunt) and she’s still a housewife. They haven’t bothered to update her character. Imagine if she discovered feminism.

Eddie has an Elvis pompadour, Beaver talks pretty much like he did when Jerry Mathers played him (he loves the word “junk”), there’s no cursing (although one character almost says “ass”), and there’s a retro cafe where Karen and Wally first meet.

At the same time, Ward and June watch Home Improvement, Beaver references The Lion King, Eddie calls Beaver “Beavis”, and one of his birthday gifts is an old-school PC with a tube monitor that doesn’t last very long. (Ward has his own comp that Eddie snoops on.)

There are zilcho surprises if you even bother to make predictions as you watch. Beaver will get his beloved ride back and redeem himself on the playing field, partly in obligatory slow motion, Wally will rekindle his puppy dog romance, cowardly Eddie will forgive him, Ward will stop acting like his own father and the two bullies will reckon with instant karma.

For a family comedy, the film is cold and mean, but also disturbing. Beaver is routinely bullied and not just by Kyle and his brother. Eddie’s creepiest moment is when he looks at Karen in the cafe and wishes he was the straw she’s sucking on. (A blowjob joke? Really?) While Wally’s out on the rink happily skating around with Karen, Eddie worms his way into his house on the false premise that he’s filling in as Beaver’s older brother, convinces the kid to sneak out on a stalking mission while the Cleavers are snowed into thinking they’re camping out in the backyard. (Eddie even pulls a Ferris Bueller and only gets away with it because Ward is a little slow.)

And then there’s Kyle skating in out of nowhere to woo Karen away from Wally. What does she see in him? He’s totally self-absorbed and it’s so obvious she prefers Wally but doesn’t keep following her feelings. There’s a scene where she spots Beaver and asks how her ex is doing. Beaver tells her the truth. He’s miserable. She just walks away with her friend and keeps seeing dickhead.

It isn’t until the very end when Kyle trips Beaver and then Wally gets his revenge on him that suddenly she remembers who she’d rather be with. She’s not a real character, just a pawn waiting to be moved into place by the male screenwriters.

Many of the characters in Leave It To Beaver are deeply dysfunctional but never amusing. (It’s rather surprising we only see the Cleavers in session.) When the school year begins, the teacher asks her students to recount their summers. One girl cheerily tells the class that her paternal grandma died and her dad was happy about this because she kept riding him for not being a big earner. A boy talks about his parents splitting up and then his dad returning only to sleep in his room while he rests on the couch.

Eddie’s father surely has been through a horrific divorce although it goes unmentioned which probably explains his anti-woman attitude (they’re all “bloodsuckers”, he spews) and why his insecure son imitates his behaviour. His mom is neither seen nor talked about.

Even Kyle and his brother come from a broken home. Their parents have split up, too. That’s how Kyle’s able to get his old flame back, playing the old sympathy card. It’s a pretty weak card.

When Karen has a birthday party, all the kids go down in the basement for a game of Spin The Bottle. (This is well before the arrival of Kyle.) When Eddie and his victim (not Karen) go off to the laundry room for some privacy, she doesn’t want to kiss him and he seems reluctant, as well. (I thought the point of this was a quick peck in front of everybody, not a clandestine make-out. Yes, I never played Spin The Bottle.) When it’s his turn Wally gets Karen (Gee, what are the odds?) and that door window steams up pretty goddamn quick.

Unsurprisingly, Leave It To Beaver was not welcomed with the same warmth and affection as the original series. Most critics loathed it. As for the audience, there wasn’t much incentive to take a trip to the theatre, so they stayed away. Contrary to what Roger Ebert of all people asserted, it is not sweet, it is not charming, it is not funny and it is not clever.

What could have been done differently? How about not rehashing the same tired gags and jokes through the same old formulas we’ve seen countless times before? How about calming down on the harassment and woman hating? How about actually taking a risk instead of settling on cliches?

Another critic writing about the film 16 years after its original release said it best:

“This. Is. Just. Bad.” Indeed.

Dennis Earl
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Sunday, December 20, 2020
4:25 a.m.

Justin Bieber’s Believe

Justin Bieber: Never Say Never made close to 100 million dollars during its astoundingly successful theatrical run. So why did the follow-up, Justin Bieber’s Believe, only make a tenth of that amount? It’s basically the same movie.

Once again, mostly uninspired concert footage featuring easily mesmerized, screaming, weeping girls is continually interrupted by the annoyingly omnipresent Scooter Braun and his management team along with big-haired Ryan Good (just a friend now for some unexplained reason), the lead guitar player, the bodyguard and of course, exuberant fans, some of whom cross the line. Added to the list of talking heads this time around are a few producers dependent on Bieber for fresh income.

There’s the Timbaland wannabe Rodney Jerkins (no more shots of him “grooving” to his own wack beats, please) talking some eye rolling bullshit about how songwriters have a “responsibility to the journey” when he’s overseeing a bubblegum artist trafficking in pop cliches while aspiring to be the white Usher.

Besides the actual return of Bieber’s idol, there’s also Black Eyed Pea Will.i.am. using nonsensical fast food metaphors to sell the young Canadian on how to end his songs on a surprising note which he never actually does. (Everything he writes is pure formula.)

And there they all are in the studio trying very hard to sell a routine pop song through their forced body language as Bieber rolls through a studio vocal take with more passion than it deserves.

Once again, because he is determined to put himself over as some kind of generous benefactor, Braun is outside various venues giving away free tickets to screwed over fans including those with bad seats. (He has to do this in disguise now because the self-absorbed svengali is already overexposed from his unwelcome presence in Never Say Never.)

In a particularly cruel moment, he tells a group of six girls who’ve been standing around for hours that he only has room for five. They have to decide who gets left out.

That’s not the cruel part. As expected, there’s a swerve. Braun tells the selfless kid she gets to sit with him during the show. That’s not an upgrade, that’s a punishment. The man never shuts the fuck up.

Every time Bieber runs through a track during his live shows, there’s his dickhead manager interrupting and hogging precious screen time auditioning to be his on-screen narrator right in the middle of a performance, often stating the obvious making him all the more redundant.

Gene Siskel always complained about how difficult it is to make the process of writing interesting on screen. Watching Bieber penciling out lyric ideas on a large notepad (we can’t see anything he’s writing) and rubbing out the unusable ones while occasionally muttering his approval, or staring at his cell phone testing out vocal ideas to his producers, is far from scintillating, proving Siskel’s point.

Braun notes that this is what he does, he gets into a room and starts writing as if it’s some incredible observation no one else has ever made about any songwriter before. We can see what he’s doing. We don’t need a play-by-play.

During the making of one of his videos, there is Braun again cheering right next to Bieber’s silent granddad watching his meal ticket come out of a water slide. Considering how much he’s probably making off the kid’s hard work, who is supposed to be the star of his own documentary, you’d think he’d take a hint and stay out of the frame. It’s goddamn annoying.

Bieber was essentially an enigma in Never Say Never, only being interviewed once near the end about his sold out MSG show. The director, John M. Chu, who returns to helm Believe, is his soft occasional interrogator in this second film.

There’s a curious, all too brief conversation about the perils of fame, the plague of yes-men and concerns about letting it all get to one’s head with the young star insisting he’ll be fine which hasn’t aged well. (There a quick home movie clip of a younger Bieber acting like a brat in a hotel room.) He had already gotten in trouble a number of times during the period this film was made which is only referenced in a hilarious segment from his appearance on Between 2 Ferns. (You can’t say the lad doesn’t have a sense of humour about his foibles as was also illustrated during his fantastic Comedy Central roast.)

There’s another exchange about how love and heartbreak evoke the same intense feelings (Really? Wow!) as Bieber stumbles to explain the sole inspiration for his songwriting which is beyond the full comprehension of his teen years. I’m starting to understand why Braun doesn’t want him talking so much but by God he’s not a good substitute at all.

Continuing another tradition from Never Say Never, with a new album to promote, Bieber makes the radio rounds and this time is interviewed by the creepy unpunished harasser Ryan Seacrest on his Top 40 On Air program. It’s an overly friendly forum full of tired hype for his new single and invented intrigue. Imagine what a real questioner could get out of the kid instead of just free promotion. These Bieber films are begging for a more genuine, personal perspective.

Instead, it’s mostly the irritating Braun constantly popping up hijacking his charge’s narrative instead of letting the young man take the lead.

The ad campaign for Believe insists that no matter what you’ve read or seen, this is “the real story”.

No, it’s not. It’s more blatant propaganda to protect a genuine talent from imploding on screen. But teasingly, little bits of truth seep out regardless, hinting at a darker, more complicated history. In retrospect, Believe feels like a preview of the full backlash yet to come. The cover-up is almost over.

There’s the now famous scene where a couple of UK paparazzi repeatedly insult a red toqued Bieber calling him a punk hoping to incite a confrontation as he tries to get into a parked minivan with his team. Understandably angry, he climbs out of the vehicle and gives them exactly what they want before he’s wisely retrieved and the minivan speeds away. (Like he was gonna do anything to his much bigger antagonizers.) As I recall, the media coverage didn’t show what the photogs were spewing even though they were dropping a lot of truth.

Bieber’s creative response to this is a video shot for his live show, a James Bond-style action sequence as dancers dressed as invasive photographers chase him into an old warehouse (because that’s what real paparazzi do) while he lightly beats them up. A more self-serving presentation you cannot find.

A better scene would’ve had him being hounded by his psychotic fans. I mean if you’re gonna make that contrived Beatles comparison about how they both evoke pandemonium in their feverish supporters, might as well nick the opening of A Hard Day’s Night which is more believable if still rather arrogant. Then again, there’s no need to when you can’t compete with reality.

There’s a genuinely frightening moment when Bieber and his team are trying to drive out of a venue after a show. A swarm of young girls howl in delight and block the van. Shockingly, a couple of the doors are unlocked and they try to get in but thankfully are cut off just in time. (In that moment, an alarmed Bieber must’ve wondered about replacing his security team.) The more desperate pound the hell out of the exterior as a big girl leans right on the front bumper. There’s no need for an interrupting narrator. It speaks for itself.

It’d be nice to get more insight on how often this happens and whether there have been other close calls. But for once, Braun is silent. (He’s here for shilling, not insight.) It can’t be fun living in constant fear from your overzealous fans.

This out-of-control hysteria is the direct result of a brilliantly manipulative marketing campaign that made the handsome Stratford, Ontario native an unattainable sex god before the age of 20. Fully aware of his magnetism, there’s a moment during one of the live shows where he cheekily lifts up his shirt to show off his abs, all in the name of safety, you see. In other scenes, he’s not wearing a shirt at all. We get it, dude. Stop teasing these girls. It’s driving them to madness.

Like Never Say Never, Bieber, like Bowie before him, is sometimes seen performing high over the crowd which carries its own risks. The heart has now been replaced by angel wings featuring designs of instruments and stereo speakers. Ever committed to sanctifying his own image, there he is flying into the start of his show as his shadowy counterpart darts around on the many monitors on stage. It all feels so phony and cheesy, especially the moment near the end when he’s standing in place and being lowered at the back of the stage holding a peace sign, the only time I laughed at his stage show. Talk about an uncomfortably perfect metaphor for his future.

At the end of one song, a pedestal rises up from where he stands at the edge of the stage as he hovers dramatically over the crowd like a political leader singing half of the track’s chorus a cappella. Say what you will about his predictably fluffy music, he can sing without a band backing him up. I wish he’d improve his drum solos, though. He’s no Neil Peart, may he rest in peace. At least he finally got rid of that obnoxious Beatle cut.

There actually is one good song in the live scenes, a modest jumper called All Around The World. The lyrics aren’t anything special but it’s a decent toe-tapping opener. Before he wrecks it with unnecessary tweaking, one of Jerkins’ unnamed studio beats is pretty good, too. And thank God for Nicki Minaj whose guest rapping on Beauty And A Beat features a very funny bit where she cleverly manages to rhyme about wanting to grind against the young man’s penis without attracting the attention of his first serious celebrity girlfriend. The rest of Bieber’s material is seriously lacking, so this unexpected cameo is a welcome bit of hot sauce.

One member of Bieber’s entourage tells a revealing anecdote about how going out for ice cream is like a CIA mission with the singer thrown in the trunk to avoid detection. Is it any wonder the kid was on drugs during this entire period? When you can’t enjoy the simple things sober, what can you enjoy?

None of this seems to concern his oblivious fans who excitedly flock to his shows, faithfully buy his merch and his music either over the net or in stores on opening day and are never disappointed. I wonder what their standards are since Bieber always seems to meet them every single time. He rarely meets mine.

He writes impossible fantasies that they swallow whole without question. One song talks about being there to help a girl achieve her dreams which sounds like something Harvey Weinstein promised his victims. Imagine, a hardworking pop star who spent 12 hours a day for two months just rehearsing his big world tour with a new crop of dancers and then doing shows for many months after that still finding the time to be a supportive boyfriend. Right.

One lyric talks about being faithful even if we’re “broke” and “homeless” (uh huh) while another, very much written from the point of view of a rich guy like himself, talks about winning a girl’s affection with his wealth. The Beatles initially pandered like this, too, but at least the tunes were good. You can tell his life experience is very limited and disconnected.

Beyond the Nicki Minaj shoutout, Selena Gomez is never seen or mentioned directly by Bieber although there is one song that seems to reference her. Through his sympathetic lyric she anonymously complains about their lack of privacy together which ties in with the whole paparazzi storyline.

Unlike Never Say Never, Bieber’s childhood friends are noticeably absent this time without explanation. (I do not miss his gruff vocal coach.) It says something that we hear far more from Braun than from both of his client’s parents combined. (Dad speaks more here than he did in either version of Never Say Never. It’s curious that Mom tells her son to pull his pants up for his shows directly to camera when he’s not in the room.)

There’s the usual recurring chatter about how much pressure he’s feeling to continue achieving commercial success but no honesty about how he needed drugs in order to cope with it all. It’s never directly addressed but Bieber’s hectic life feels very lonely and unhealthy. His closest relationships are with powerful older men who all stand to profit from all of his music. He lives an isolated existence.

Perhaps to counter the long held notion that he’s solely a chick artist, a few male fans pop up to sing his praises, two of whom lamely claim the haters just don’t understand and we’re just jealous. Some guy from Europe is such a devotee he has a younger Bieber tattooed on his leg. Even the girls don’t go that far.

Speaking of them, we could be spared home videos of them screaming to the heavens or burbling uncontrollably because they got tickets to his shows. In one video, a girl’s brother is more interested in opening his own Christmas present. Thank God I’m an only child.

In another carryover from Never Say Never, there’s the obligatory sequence where Bieber shows kindness to a young fan. In Believe, it’s a 6-year-old girl suffering from an unnamed fatal illness. Give him credit. She is desperate to meet him and he goes above and beyond just a simple meet and greet and I believe he would do this even if the cameras weren’t rolling. He bonds with her, playing board games and basically making her young life complete. (I think he relates to her loneliness. Her days are spent in a hospital. Who knows if she has friends her age.) Say what you will about his many personal failings, he is good with kids, especially the baby sister he held and played with in the earlier film who returns a little older with his father in a brief cameo.

Highly flattered by her audacity (she “married” his cardboard cutout in the hospital and now considers herself to be his wife which, I’m sorry, is weird), he plays along like the polite Canadian he sometimes can still be. During the traditional One Less Lonely Girl portion of his Apollo Theatre show, he carries her out and serenades her. Then, they converse on stage to the amusement of the crowd. He handles the whole thing very well as he gently and warmly gives her a graceful exit.

When she dies four days before the official start of his second world tour in Arizona, he dedicates another performance of the song to her (the movie is dedicated to her memory as well) during the opening gig as he directly addresses her images through a montage of videos and photos playing on a giant screen. As he softly reflects on her passing (“I miss her, bro”) during one of the Chu segments, he is moved to tears. It’s a rare genuine moment in this relentless flood of artifice.

The shocking lack of interest in Justin Bieber’s Believe is not a surprise to me. It follows the Never Say Never playbook fairly closely without too much deviation. Despite their slavish devotion to his music, even the fans smelled a con job a mile away.

We hear more from the man himself this time but he’s neither articulate nor candid. The film’s insistence on downplaying his more jerky qualities in favour of literally elevating him into an angel is irresponsible and flat out dishonest. As before, there are murky clues to a more complex portrayal but greedy Braun is gonna squeeze as much out of this kid’s bogus clean act as he can. He is utterly shameless. What else would you expect from the man who fucked over Taylor Swift?

There are times when you wonder if the helicopter manager was in the actual editing room as Believe was being assembled. How else to explain the inclusion of meaningless scenes like his recounting of how John Chu got pressured into running the Believe tour (the paper plate contract stupidity was wisely excised) or self-indulgently asserting tired claptrap about how music is the unifying force in the world (is Nickelback universally loved?), how he’s made many friends because of it, how it helped him cope with matters of the heart, blah blah blah. Does anyone else really give a fuck what he thinks about any of this?

The most interesting scene was actually cut from the finished film. In a deleted segment included as a bonus feature, Braun admits he has had some very serious disagreements with his young hotheaded charge to the point where it degenerated into screaming matches.

Why wasn’t any of that caught on film? That’s the Justin Bieber movie I want to see.

Dennis Earl
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Friday, December 18, 2020
3:13 a.m.

Cujo (1983)

Cujo is a soap opera interrupted by a horror film.  Two dysfunctional families have to set all their considerable problems aside in order to survive the relentless onslaught of a very determined St. Bernard. It as absurd as it sounds.

The first family is loaded.  Donna, the selfish mom (ever Milfy Dee Wallace Stone before she was married), is having an affair.  Vic, the oblivious dad (Daniel Hugh-Kelly), is going through a serious professional crisis.

Donna is boffing a bearded “stud” named Kemp (Christopher Stone).  He does little favours for the family, mostly carving and stripping wood.  To stay close to Donna, he subjects himself to routine drubbings on the tennis court with her husband. 

Family dinner time involves a lot of silence and little eating. The marrieds are not getting busy.

In the meantime, Vic is trying to salvage a damaged ad campaign for a popular line of breakfast cereals directly targeted to kids.  When they go to the bathroom after eating a bowl, they piss red.  Freaking out thinking it’s their own blood, it’s actually red dye.  Regardless, the ads and the cereals get yanked, and Vic and his team are stuck.  They can’t think of anything better than “Nope.  Nothing wrong here.”

The second family is middle class.  Joe, the dad (Ed Lauter), is a grumpy abusive mechanic who works out of a barn. His wife and son want nothing to do with him.  She pretends she just won a $5000 lottery while secretly planning a trip to Boston so the two of them can flee for good.  They tell Joe they’ll be back in a week.  Meanwhile, he wants to go gallivanting and carousing with his drunken pal while they’re away.  Why are they even married?

Connecting the two families are two vehicles, one of which is Donna’s shitty Ford Pinto.  Vic halfheartedly tries to fix it after finally learning the truth about his wandering wife.   (Why didn’t he just buy her a new one ages ago?) After learning about Joe from the local mailman while being impatient with a much slower mechanic closer to the family’s estate, he first gets his fancy red sports car repaired six miles away at the poorer family’s property.

With an angered Vic very eager to get away to rescue the lucrative cereal account despite his wife insisting it’s over with Kemp, Donna and their timid young son, Tad (Danny Pintauro from Who’s The Boss?), decide to make the long drive up to Joe’s place.  They barely make it. The Pinto is on the verge of death.

And that’s when Cujo becomes a problem.  Cujo the dog, I mean.  Joe’s son can’t find him before he leaves, a lucky break. His mom tells him to call his dad to make sure he’s properly fed. He calls multiple times but no one’s answering. It’s all for naught. The dog’s no longer interested in grub from the store.

In the opening scene, Cujo chases a quicker and smarter little rabbit all the way into a bat cave. Only able to fit his head through the narrow opening, he is soon hounded by the disturbed, screeching beasts. He actually removes it at one point, but instead of trotting off in the opposite direction safe and sound, he pokes it back in again and gets chomped.

It takes nearly half the movie, some 40 minutes or so, before the goddamn rabies finally transform him into a soaking, snotty, bloody mess. He is not scary and, as Gene Siskel correctly pointed out during the film’s theatrical release 37 years ago, he’s actually a victim.

The real villains are the humans. Abusive Joe, his alcoholic compadre (who doesn’t treat Cujo very well), obsessive Kemp (determined to keep his affair going no matter what), pissed off Vic and guilt-ridden Donna. Besides Joe’s wife and son, the only other innocent among them is poor Tad. Already terrified of his bedroom because his closet door keeps popping open and he thinks an unseen monster is inside, there is scene after scene of him freaking the fuck out as the now monstrous Cujo, a big, lumbering, droopy-eyed menace, continually attacks his mother’s Pinto. (I love how the “R” in “FORD” is missing. Does the dog think it really spells “FOOD”?)

But the remarkably patient Cujo gets tired. Often. And lies around either near the car or a short distance away, leaving Donna and Tad trapped inside their own increasingly stifling prison on two hot summer days. Just opening a door attracts his attention. Opening the window just a smidge is a risk. For a big hairball, he’s quicker than he looks, so running is foolish. And he’s more cunning now, damaging the decrepit Pinto in just the right places.

Meanwhile, completely distracted by his personal problems, Vic keeps trying to call his wife at home. It takes him two whole days to realize that maybe this cereal business isn’t as important as saving his marriage. Wrongly concluding that she’s back in Kemp’s bed, he comes home discovering his house in shambles and fearing the worst. Having already assaulted a now completely disinterested Donna mere moments before she confesses to Vic before his impromptu trip, an infuriated Kemp goes to town on a bunch of pillows and her photo with a readily accessible Ginsu knife. Gotta love the 80s.

When one of the local cops doesn’t come back from visiting Joe’s farm (after Vic mentions that Donna might’ve taken the Pinto in for repairs) and the now worried husband learns that an arrested Kemp didn’t kidnap his family as he wrongly suspected, Vic finally realizes where he needs to go. Let’s just say he’s not dependable in an emergency.

Cujo was originally a novel by Stephen King. This film adaptation mostly sticks to his original plot with the exception of the climax which is not as bleak and the coda which is discarded altogether. It has a lot of credibility problems for me, both minor and significant.

It’s not clear why Vic doesn’t just fix that closet door in Tad’s room to put his son at ease. He knows once he figures out how to prevent it from opening up on its own, the kid won’t have to put much of his furniture against it so he can sleep. Instead, he comes up with some kind of ritualistic poem to “protect” Tad, which he later writes out for him before he leaves. I’m surprised there isn’t a scene where Cujo eats the paper.

As for the neglected Pinto, is this a visual metaphor meant to subtly explain the impasse in his marriage to Donna? Had he gotten it fixed or replaced a lot sooner, she’d still be fucking him? And why does Donna feel guilty about her affair with Kemp? Nothing is happening in her own bed. What is she really going back to that’s so great?

As for the Cujo attacks, how on earth does Donna survive for as long as she does? The dog easily disposes of a number of male characters but not her? One of them actually has a gun he doesn’t fucking use. Cujo takes a decent bite out of her leg but not her neck and somehow she holds on? Come on.

And then there’s the business of her and her son being locked up in a stiflingly humid car for two days. They don’t eat, they barely drink, he pees exactly once. Yes, the window is rolled down a bit but not the entire time. (There’s no AC.) They strip down to get cool and then the kid has trouble breathing and at a couple of points is unconscious. With a completely drenched Cujo also looking pretty dehydrated, how are any of these characters functioning at any kind of level when they be passed out and possibly dead in the real world almost immediately?

Eventually and inevitably, Donna finds her opening and thinks she’s ended the crisis. But of course, this being a cliched horror film, she hasn’t. How fortunate she has a better weapon at her disposal than a bat this time. How fortunate, indeed.

Stephen King admitted years after he wrote it that Cujo was mostly created while he was snorting tons of blow. If this doesn’t disprove the notion that drugs improve your creativity then nothing will.

Dennis Earl
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Friday, December 18, 2020
2:04 a.m.

Sweet Sixteen (1983)

There have been slasher films about masked maniacs, trans girls, deformed monsters and vengeful misogynists. And there’s even been one about white privilege.

The misleadingly titled and marketed Sweet Sixteen isn’t really about a young girl’s birthday party. It’s about how two Indigenous characters are routinely treated like shit by the local townspeople.

The oldest one, Greyfeather (Henry Wilcoxon), is accosted by two cartoonish rednecks shortly after sitting down at the bar. “You’re not welcome here,” one of them warns. Then his friend Jason Longshadow (Don Shanks) enters and a weak fight ensues. It only ends because the annoyed bartender pulls out a rifle. Inevitably, all their paths will cross again.

As Jason takes the old man to the parking lot, a cute gal named Mellissa (Aleisa Shirley) starts hitting on him. (“She’s 15 going on 25,” notes the back cover of the DVD.) He harshly dismisses her foolish advances, calling her a “little girl” and ordering her to “go home”.

But when some douchey guy closer to her age, who is terrified of Jason and won’t make a move until he drives off, finally approaches her, she has her spontaneous date for the evening.

Unbeknownst to her, they park on ancient Indigenous land (a very disrespectful act, not at all unique, despite the obvious privacy it affords), and start getting busy in the back of his pick-up truck. But then she hears a noise and the mood passes just before she gets his jeans undone. She jumps out of the truck but when she rushes to get in the passenger side, douchey guy takes his time before allowing her in.

All the while, someone is watching them from a short distance, the shadow of a head feather clearly visible.

Their lacklustre evening continues right outside her rented home where she lives with her mom (the late Susan Strasberg) and her dad (the late Patrick Macnee). After taking a hit of the ol’ wacky tobacki, the night is over when stonefaced daddo takes a major disliking to douchey guy as he suddenly appears when they exit the truck.

Macnee is an archeologist (the film was released in 1983 so surely this is a nod of sorts to Raiders Of The Lost Ark) and he’s received a grant to spend a few months digging in the aforementioned ancient Indigenous territory. Among the burial grounds are dead chiefs who have been laid to rest with their giant ceremonial knives.

Jason is hired by Macnee to help dig up the dirt. But these precious knives that the archeologist covets are missing. He rightly suspects the young Indigenous man may have had ulterior motives for taking this job.

That leads me to a question. Although it’s never directly addressed, is Jason protesting Macnee’s excavation by making sure he doesn’t take an important piece of his ancestors’ history with him? I ask this because the movie, ever conscious of the swerve, would rather let us believe he’s a killer or at least one of the chief suspects.

For you see, a couple of Mellissa’s would-be paramours get stabbed from behind and the front on two different nights. First, douchey guy after his pick-up truck runs out of gas and he starts wandering out in the wild stoned and shitfaced. And then, after they bond over their collective love of drugtaking, the football star from her high school.

They make plans to hook up and maybe shoot up, but Mr. Long Hair gets carved up and yet another night of debauchery is cut short before it really gets started. Hate when that happens.

When questioned by the police about douchey guy’s murder, Mellissa, the last person to see him alive, exposes herself as a white supremacist. She blames Jason claiming it was he who put the moves on her and she wasn’t having any of that. No, sir. She’s a good girl. When questioned about football guy, she points the finger at Greyfeather who appears on the scene out of nowhere immediately after she discovers her classmate’s stabbed and bloodied body. (One of her many lusty admirers thinks she’s the “common denominator” to both killings. That does not stop him from wanting to get busy with her.)

Fortunately the Sheriff (a mostly soft spoken Bo Hopkins) who just happens to be half-Indigenous himself knows better. But he’s no closer to solving either case. Not even his daughter Marci (the very cute Dana Kimmell from the third Friday The 13th debacle), a wannabe detective herself, can put it all together. (Love how the crime novel she’s reading is actually called Murder Mystery.)

After the two murder victims have a double gravesite service, Marci confronts Mellissa. Shortly before the ceremony, the Sheriff goes to have a talk with Greyfeather. But the old man doesn’t answer the door and no lights are on. When the Sheriff finds him, his lifeless body is hanging by a noose. (Where’s his funeral?)

It’s obvious who murdered him. And it’s also obvious that were it not for Mellissa falsely accusing the old man of offing football guy, the two cartoonish rednecks would had to have found some other flimsy reason to lynch a vulnerable Indigenous person. (How come the Sheriff doesn’t interrogate them even he knows their the culprits?)

Marci calls her out, even rightly calling her a bitch. But then, in the most abrupt about-face I may have ever seen in a movie, she suddenly apologizes and wants to be Mellissa’s friend, insisting to her own family that she’s nice and “sensitive”. (What the fuck?) In the final act, there she is smiling and hugging her while giving the spoiled bigot a very shitty gift. Your dead mom’s old handkerchief? Are you fucking kidding me?

In the meantime, Jason gets pinched over the stolen knives (Hopkins discovers them all unblemished and carefully wrapped up and hidden in a treasure chest) but when the Sheriff’s deputy goes into his cell to give him some grub, he suddenly turns into Billy Jack and eventually elbows the guy into unconsciousness. To maintain the fraud that Jason is the killer, there he is grabbing his confiscated knife from one of the desk drawers just before he departs.

There’s another attempted lynching, the return of those cartoonish rednecks who turn out to be perverts as well, an unsurprising suicide, a failed drunken play for a married woman, and an unintentionally humourous and predictable final shot slowed down to time with an appropriate lyric in a cornball theme song because why not? Let’s just be grateful that sequel never materialized.

You could be half-watching Sweet Sixteen in something of a hazy stupor and still figure out who’s been killing horny teen boys and who would be doing it in the future if they ever did make that hinted follow-up. But when you’re proven correct, you’ll be dumbfounded by the explanation. (On the sole DVD bonus feature, even Hopkins, Shirley and producer/director Jim Sotos, who offer their mostly positive memories of the film’s creation while airplanes occasionally drown out their comments, are at a loss and can’t quite lay out this pitiful pay-off. It does not help that they began shooting without a completed script.)

To confirm your suspicions, the film leaves huge bread crumbs for you to pick up. A prodigal character suddenly returning home, an angry passing comment about their father, their conspicuous absences. No matter how much they want you to be a racist, the Indigenous characters are not guilty of bumping off these forgettable horndogs.

It is weird how much the film sexualizes the underage Mellissa character. She’s supposed to be 15 (even though she looks like a college student) but there she is fully nude and exposed taking a shower in a nothing scene only used for cheap titillation. (Does she not have a curtain?) And there she is again with Marci’s rebellious brother stripped down to panties as she dives into the lake for a quick dip while getting away from her own party. I mean Aleisa Shirley, the actor who plays her, was an adult at the time she appeared here in her debut role but still.

All that said, for a cheapo exploitation flick, that somehow attracted major talent slumming it for a quick payday, Sweet Sixteen is remarkably restrained which thankfully lessens the cringe factor but doesn’t up the quality. The few scenes of violence mostly lack intensity and conviction, and despite the wanton display of Shirley’s admittedly nice body, there’s nothing saucier here than a quick makeout and soft ab kisses.

Curiously, if you take away the nonsensical slasher plot there are still ingredients leading to a potential good film about white supremacy had that path been taken more seriously and further explored. But the movie is so committed to the former it is stubbornly determined to find some resolution, any resolution it turns out, at the expense of the latter. The one it settles on is so ridiculous even the actors have a hard time trying to keep it all straight.

Dennis Earl
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Monday, December 14, 2020
3:22 a.m.

Beauty Shop (2005)

In Beauty Shop, Queen Latifah once again plays Gina, a sassy hairdresser performing instant makeovers for helpless women, many of them rich and white. First introduced in the second Barbershop film, she was funny and bold in her limited moments as we learned about her romantic history with Calvin (Ice Cube), the once reluctant proprietor of his father’s old business located directly across the street from her own salon on the South Side of Chicago.

In this comically stale spin-off where she’s not given any killer lines this time, she relocates to Atlanta. And she’s been given a new backstory.

Gina is now suddenly a widow (we have no idea how her partner died) and the mother of a young piano prodigy. (They live with her mother-in-law and her own teenage offspring, a grown up Rudy from The Cosby Show, who has a lot of boyfriends.) The move to Georgia allows Gina’s daughter to attend a prestigious arts school where she can further her knowledge of and sharpen her talent for playing classical music.

No longer running her own business, Gina works for Jorge Christophe, a seriously miscast Kevin Bacon who looks like Iggy Pop in the Cold Metal video but sounds like a half-hearted Nazi. Perhaps to cover for that weak accent, it’s later revealed it’s all an act. He’s actually not Austrian. How Gina learns this is never really explained. Did Google give him away?

At any event, the completely unfunny Jorge is a pretentious twit who doesn’t actually appear to know what he’s doing. He can’t even do a routine shampoo job. And Gina can’t stand his pointless restrictions and overall rigidness. There’s a terrible scene where his pronunciation of moniker is bizarrely interpreted as a racial epithet. Desperate.

Speaking of unconvincing accents, Alicia Silverstone plays her exaggeratedly Southern co-worker, an actual shampoo girl who can really cut and style. But Jorge won’t let her move up and have her own booth which makes no sense. When Jorge insists that Gina drop everything to take care of a very important client one day, she lets her pal work on the woman she has to abandon.

When Jorge finds out directly from his top employee, it leads to an argument and Gina quits. Shampoo girl soon follows suit. A quick perusal online leads them to an abandoned property that is eventually transformed from something the 70s threw up (that’s a funny observation if a little harsh) into something less colourful but more acceptable for contemporary times (I prefer old school red to this bland grey). After initially being rejected for a large loan, of course an impromptu makeover in the bathroom will generate an instant reversal even though the sum is far smaller than requested. Gina inherits the old staff of the previous owner (how were they all still available?) except for two stuck-up gals, both with car names purely for an eventual throwaway joke, who quit before the relaunch and are never seen again.

Supremely lovely Mena Suvari plays an insecure client of Gina’s who eventually starts going to the new location as does the always gorgeous and equally uncertain Andie MacDowell, stuck in an unhappy marriage with an always traveling philanderer she pointlessly remains committed to pleasing sexually to no reciprocal appreciation whatsoever. Because they’re loaded honkies, there’s the usual awkward encounters with Black people.

When a frizzy-haired MacDowell arrives for the first time outside Gina’s new salon she thinks a passerby is a valet and hands the puzzled stranger her car keys. That bit isn’t funny but the unexpected conversation about “Janice Jackson” and her exposed boob and whether or not MacDowell is into her definitely is. (An Alive reference about a bootilicious babe in short shorts is also gold.) Keeping with the frustrating tradition of the Barbershop series, it’s a welcome albeit brief comic jolt that unfortunately can’t resuscitate an already terminally diseased movie as we once again fall into a prolonged lull of bad zingers that inspire nothing but dead silence.

When Suvari makes a play for shampoo girl’s new boyfriend, a Black hairdresser everyone initially and dumbly thinks is gay because he likes Oprah and wears a man bag, it leads to the usual racial tension and a cancelled opportunity for Gina to take her secret hair conditioner she had already been using at Jorge’s upscale joint to a major cosmetics company for a possible sales push. Thinking she’s too small upstairs, Suvari wastes 16 G’s on can implants she doesn’t need. Because Jorge continues to neg her about her body, she remains insecure. The ladies at the salon get in their own digs.

Besides her bickering personnel and loyal uptighty whities, Gina’s new salon also has serious electrical problems. There’s an unsightly hole in the ceiling with protruding, dangling wires and where gentle ivory ticklings are heard constantly from the apartment upstairs. It is no surprise that the handsome electrician called to give an estimate on all the damage downstairs is the same guy supposedly driving Gina insane with his upscale bar music. Played by Djimon Hounsou, who coincidentally enough appeared in a Janet Jackson video during his modelling days, he is predictably lax about being paid right away for extensive work because he’s a swell guy in general. His presence in the same building as the salon is more of a convenience that anything else. Why else open your door to her while not wearing a shirt? I mean I’m not getting away with that.

It’s obvious they both fancy each other despite their utter lack of chemistry and Gina’s bogus annoyance of always hearing him play during the quietest moment of her work day (he’s not awful at all, though; just unexciting), one of the weaker reasons for delaying their inevitable lip locking. Once her daughter starts hanging out with him (he teaches her some jazz which she’ll sprinkle into her classical presentation during her school recital), resistance is futile.

Like Barbershop, Beauty Shop is filled with eccentric hairdressers throwing out one-liners in scenes more suited for a sitcom than a feature film. The difference this time is that these characters are way more annoying as they keep repeating the same jokes over and over. Sherri Shepherd plays a pregnant mom who names all her kids after famous Black athletes while Alfre Woodard, normally cast in hard-hitting dramas like the great Grand Canyon, is obsessed with African garb and the poetry of Maya Angelou which she endlessly recites.

Silverstone’s shampoo girl is viewed with great suspicion by all of Gina’s new Black employees, especially the cat-like Golden Brooks, until she gets her own acceptable makeover and starts twerking with her new boyfriend during a celebratory trip to the club. (She looks great doing it, too.) So, they accept her more when she appropriates their culture rather than being a Southern white girl even though they originally don’t approve of her taking the place of a Black woman? Odd.

Once he becomes aware of Gina’s thriving new business, dopey old Jorge, now overly friendly, stops by after a envious drive-by. Also collectively raising eyebrows is the occasional presence of a local inspector handing down fines for the salon’s unstable electricity (how much repair work did Hounsou actually do besides supplying a temporary back-up generator during an accidental outtage?) and threatening a shutdown if it’s not repaired. (It never does get fixed.)

When a creepy kid, a wannabe rapper constantly harassing women at the salon (including Gina’s deeply disinterested daughter) and videotaping their ample posteriors, just happens to spot Jorge and the inspector making a questionable business transaction in broad daylight right next to a public basketball court, the camera is rolling. Soon, Gina’s place is thoroughly trashed. But Jorge’s bad deed will not go unpunished. (Why no final reveal?)

Beauty Shop is one of those fluffy screen comedies where the stakes feel low and our heroes are never in any serious danger because it never lives in the real world. Despite all the vandalism, Gina’s place is completely restored almost immediately, albeit with temporary household items replacing the damaged commercial equipment. Gina doesn’t have enough time to get upset over it because she’s also just seen her daughter play piano in front of a receptive crowd and once she returns to work post-restoration, a local celebrity is about to save her business. Speaking of that, how do they not recognize her voice until they hear her broadcasting again on the radio?

In spite of only getting a fraction of what she asked for at the bank ($30000 instead of 100 G’s), the 1500 in fines and the extensive need for electrical repairs (that’s another six grand), you know her salon will never be shut down. Indeed, by the time they get that radio shoutout from the Black female Howard Stern the sense is business is about to pick up even more. But when? Forget the compromised public inspector, what about the threat of debt collectors?

It’s disappointing to watch a comedy about women where denigrating each other’s looks and sexual appetites is the norm, an awful trademark of the Barbershop movies. You know, that whole “ho” versus good girl argument (although admittedly there’s some funny lines about that in The Next Cut). The hostility towards Silverstone feels particularly phony when you know she will eventually be accepted and defended. You know her new lover isn’t gay (a ridiculously insulting subplot) and will fancy her over the others. You know Jorge won’t succeed in sabotaging Gina’s business. And Keshia Knight-Pulliam, a stereotypical gold digger, will inevitably find her calling by trying to be more like Gina and less prone to getting in trouble.

Botched casting, subpar material, no zingers for its appealing lead, a derivative storyline with few pay-offs. It’s not a surprise we haven’t seen a Beauty Shop 2.

Dennis Earl
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Tuesday, December 8, 2020
4:22 a.m.

Barbershop: The Next Cut

Here’s the most frustrating thing about the Barbershop movies. When they’re funny, they’re really funny. But ultimately, the laughs are too infrequent. Inconsistency is a major problem. There are often disappointingly long stretches where nothing at all is amusing. Really long stretches. And then suddenly, out of nowhere, you’re laughing again. But then just as suddenly, you’re stonefaced for another large chunk of time. It’s tedious waiting for another laugh that may or may not come and in the second half of The Next Cut, it really doesn’t come at all.

Ironically, this third and likely final installment of the series (not counting the off-shoot Beauty Shop), is easily the funniest despite still being very hit and miss. R. Kelly and Bill Cosby, deserving targets of cutting one-liners in the previous chapters, are once again skewered in such a way I wish every joke focused exclusively on them. They get cut down so brutally and brilliantly, it’s inspired. And this was before they were put in prison.

But the franchise is stubbornly set in its uneven ways making for a very disjointed experience, especially since it insists on being so many genres at once resulting in a constantly unsettled tone. For you see, this overstuffed threequel wants to be a harrowing drama as well, an impossibility when you’re living in PG Land. You can’t get to the heart of a gut wrenching subject without conveying it in a completely authentic manner. Ignorant simplicity is sadly the order of the day here. A shame.

Once again set in the South Side of Chicago, while Cedric The Entertainer and company roast celebrities and each other for much of the first hour of its overlong almost two-hour running time (only sometimes successfully), teen gangs are mindlessly shooting each other as well as innocent bystanders. Things have gotten so bad, Calvin (Ice Cube) is privately thinking of relocating his inherited barbershop to the North, a move no one in his salon will likely support hence the secrecy. Still married with a now vulnerable teenage son who looks like a young Larenz Tate, he worries about the future of his neighbourhood.

Midway through the film, Calvin and his team make the decision to negotiate a ceasefire between two rival gangs causing all the mayhem. The Gangster Disciples wear blue, the Vice Lords red. Every time their leaders find themselves in the shop at the same time they nearly come to blows and have to be separated. The second time this happens, they agree to steer clear of each other for 48 hours. During that time Calvin’s Barbershop will stay open and offer free haircuts as a peace offering.

But this seems less about keeping the peace and more about selfishly promoting the shop. In fact, a similar gimmick was offered in Back In Business, the second film, albeit not for a non-stop two-day period. At least in that one, you also got a free burger or hot dog and the barbers didn’t have to operate on no sleep. (Would you really want someone shaving your head dead tired?)

Because “the recession never left the South Side”, Calvin’s Barbershop has combined with a beauty shop run by a cute, blue-haired and thankfully dialed down Regina Hall. (How did they open up all that space to accommodate the second business when times are tough?) One of her employees is the astoundingly curvaceous Nicky Minaj. As she bats her sinful brown eyes toward the very married Common (who gets hitched to Eve in the opening), it’s very hard to believe that anyone, let alone this guy, could ever turn her down. God knows I wouldn’t. Wearing delightfully skimpy clothes that are painted on, there’s a revealing moment when she’s walking up the stairs to her apartment in her exceedingly tight blue jeans after Common drops her off. He takes one long look at that ass and says what we’re all thinking: “Damn.” I have a sickness for that thickness.

Utterly confused about her intentions (she gives him deliberately mixed signals), there’s the obligatory moment where she eventually makes a failed play for him in the supply closet of the barbershop (confirming his suspicions once and for all) and Eve catches them together reaching the wrong conclusion. This is all very tired but it gets weirder after the couple reconciles and Minaj apologizes. After making peace, the buxom hairdresser then offers herself up for a Minaj-a-trois which Common “jokingly” urges Eve to consider. I don’t think she was kidding.

Again, it’s not believable that Common would not involve himself sexually with the Anaconda singer, I don’t care how ethical he thinks he is. We are weak and she knows it. Constantly complaining about Eve’s long work absences and their lackluster sex life, when they actually have a sex life, after another fight at home, Eve literally offers her ass to the man but he’s “not a piece of meat” so no thanks, honey. I mean, come on. You won’t get it on with your lovely wife nor the hot temptress at work. Do you have a working penis at all, dude?

Common and Eve take in a young teen who befriends Calvin’s son. The movie sets up the idea that he’s a bad influence. (We see them orchestrate a transparent scheme early on where they rob the barbershop of dollar candy bars which the eagle-eyed owner loudly spots immediately before asking them to leave.) But in reality, Calvin has way more to worry about than Common.

Upon leaving the expanded salon, the red gang steps in to save the two lads when the suddenly arriving blue gang make less than innocent inquiries about a worn pair of Jordans. Hundred dollar bills are thrown around and graciously accepted. Suddenly, there’s the possibility of two new recruits. But is it really believable?

True, they don’t seem to have any other friends other than themselves. Parental discipline is mistaken for interfering with their independent happiness. Judging by the botched candy scam, they’re also strapped for cash since neither of them work. And yeah, the blue gang seems determined to hurt them so maybe aligning with their rivals will spare them from more harassment. But are these kids really down with being part of a teenage mafia? Neither really come from broken homes. In fact, Calvin’s kid might have a future in basketball.

In between the hot and cold comedy, there’s a lot of lecturing and preaching but not a lot of insight about the sad state of Chicago. If you’re going to be political in any real sense in a movie like this, you need to call out the responsible parties. We only see Democrat Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s name floating by on a TV screen in a split second but no furious diatribe against his racist, deeply destructive neoliberal policies, the worst of which admittedly came after 2016.

Furthermore, the two rival gangs themselves aren’t given much screen time or fully developed personalities when we do see them. They’re perceived by Calvin and his colleagues as irrational thugs, roving crazies who live to terrorize. (Hall mentions that a citizen wearing any of their colours will become a target. Huh?) There’s zero mention of The Drug War and how the black market they likely control is how they’re able to throw money around to attract new recruits. The scarcity of good schools and well paying jobs prevents them from fully assimilating like everybody else. When you have no prospects, joining a gang is seen as a social, economic advancement.

When a cleancut teen, who enjoys earning a few bucks cleaning up in the back of the barbershop in between classes, gets murdered during the ceasefire rendering the whole exercise a colossal waste of time, as briefly acknowledged by Calvin, we have no idea why. Was he targeted? Was he walking to the library at the wrong possible time? To not offer any additional details is rather inexcusable. There’s no honest resolution. When it comes down to getting real with its audience, Barbershop: The Next Cut is awfully timid about addressing such an important ongoing social tragedy head on. There’s no sense in all the bluster.

There is talk about the lingering damage of slavery, a quick name check of recent Black victims of police brutality which was supposed to stop once a Black man became President and, to her momentary credit, Minaj correctly pointing out that Obama hadn’t exactly done much for “the community” without pointing out the bailing out of corrupt banks and the abandonment of wrongly foreclosed homeowners, many of whom were Black.

But it’s clear the 44th commander in chief is not seen as a significant part of the problem, either. Speaking on behalf of the majority in his shop, Calvin declares his open support while the politically incorrect Eddie (Cedric The Entertainer who can still deliver a decent banger when he wants to) claims he actually cut the man’s hair when he was a community activist which no one believes. In the film’s final scene, an impersonator arrives proving Eddie wasn’t lying but the inevitable joke of a botched trim, a recycled bit from Back In Business that played better in the earlier film, and Minaj backing down and actually saluting the man, are depressing signs of capitulation and needless hero worshiping. Democrats, Black ones in particular, should demand way more of their destructive centrist party since they along, with Indigenous and Brown communities, bear the brunt of their human rights abuses the most.

A couple of original cast members, who show up for a scene or two, are ultimately replaced with new barbers including a Republican Indian guy who seems clueless on the Black experience but is much more on point about R. Kelly. His hilarious argument with a customer who never leaves (deodorant pitchman Deon Cole in a scene-stealing performance) but strangely is never asked to showcases the best series of jokes in the entire film.

Another barber, a feminist virgin who lacks confidence with women (prolific commercial actor Lamorne Morris), will get the shock of his life when one of the salon gals who takes exception to Eddie’s chauvinism belatedly reveals he won’t be alone for long. She must be the most tolerant person in the world.

There are so many plots and characters competing for your attention (there’s too much JB Smooth and we don’t need Anthony Anderson at all) The Next Cut feels like an entire TV season shoved into a single movie. It’s both overly episodic and needlessly chaotic. It just feels too cluttered. There’s no time to let a scene breathe without another story barging in sucking up all the remaining oxygen. One minute the characters in the shop are dancing because their marathon ceasefire stunt gets a shout-out on the radio, the next they learn about the dead kid and the mood never recovers despite a forced attempt in the third act.

Not nearly funny enough to work as a standalone comedy, not remotely dramatic enough to succeed as a tragedy, not daring enough to be a true soap opera and not penetratingly honest enough to be vital social commentary, the film tries to be all things to all audiences without really going down an original, enlightening path. Realizing the truth requires a much more dour ending, it rapidly concludes all its remaining storylines attempting to put a happy face on everything. Even Calvin’s final bit of narration asserts that all will be well in Chicago because the city knows how to survive.

But how will they survive when you won’t address the real issues plaguing the streets?

Dennis Earl
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Tuesday, December 8, 2020
3:31 a.m.