Remembering 2021, My Sixteenth Year Of Blogging (Part Two)

Not every entry this year was dark and foreboding. With the ongoing pandemic continuing to disrupt all of our lives, it’s more important than ever to make time for silliness. And nothing was sillier on this site that my puerile song parody, Oh, What A Fart.

While researching another piece, I borrowed a greatest hits package of The Four Seasons from the library. An unintended pleasure: I could not stop singing along to these classic songs. (I ended up buying my own copy off of Amazon, one of many CDs I purchased from the site this year.)

After their highly successful run in the 60s, the group adjusted to the disco revolution and found even more success at the tail end of the 70s. December 1963 (Oh, What A Night), their last number one, is a particular highlight. For whatever reason, I conjured up a flashback scenario where a guy embarrasses himself on a date by clearing the room with his flatulence, a moment of infamy that still haunts him. Written at a time when my mother was slowly recovering from cancer surgery, it was welcome comic relief.

Yes, this year was a terrible one for the most important woman in my life, the woman who birthed me and raised me and continues to love and support me no matter what. It was incredibly painful watching her deteriorate thanks to a mysterious giant-ass tumour that had latched itself onto her bowel and pressed hard on her stomach. She lost about 20 pounds but thankfully, now that the tumour has been carefully removed, she has regained her lost stature. She has come a long way from the start of the year.

During her horrible 11-day stay in the hospital back in late May and early June, I tried to keep myself busy by returning to a project that has been an undying passion for most of my life.

After nearly a year and a half, The History Of The Mystery Track series returned with three new entries in the Spring. Having already written about the best version of You Oughta Know in 2019, it was finally time to write about Your House, the other unlisted song from Jagged Little Pill.

Subtitled Alanis Morissette Fantasizes About Stalking Her Ex, it proved that the Canadian not only can sing without instrumental back-up, she really can protect the identity of a former lover. Poor Dave Coulier.

Lauryn Hill Covers Frankie Valli, the aforementioned article that motivated me to get The Very Best Of Frankie Valli & The Four Seasons, tells the unlikely story of how Can’t Take My Eyes Off You became a hit all over again thanks to a modernized contribution to a bad movie and fierce demand for new material from a fresh new talent.

Finally, I wrote an epic essay on The Osbournes Family Album, the 2002 compilation featuring personal favourites without track numbers from members of the family and a whole slew of uncredited dialogue clips from the first season of the infamous MTV series. It took a while to match the audio drops with the right episodes but it was worth the expanded effort.

This was not a great year for watching movies. Extremely distracted by so much bad news, some screenings were agonizingly long, much longer than the actual running times. But somehow, someway, I still managed to write dozens of reviews in this space despite screening far fewer flicks this year.

2021 began with a 25th Anniversary assessment of Big Bully, the atrocious Rick Moranis/Tom Arnold comedy which I had missed during its original theatrical run. That was followed by the rare Australian softcore feature Felicity which was not nearly as hot and explicit as I had hoped.

Back In Time, the flawed, indulgent but still enjoyable documentary about Back To The Future which I watched twice, was one of the few good films I wrote about this year along with the US cut of David Cronenberg’s still provocative Crash and the sleeper horror flick Gretel & Hansel.

Every other title I critiqued was various degrees of disposable garbage. There was recent fare like the limp Fatale and the action/horror misfire Rogue with its lousy special effects. Jason Blum’s Blumhouse productions struck out twice with The Craft: Legacy and a totally misguided reworking of Fantasy Island.

I found myself not freaking out during other horror duds like The Prodigy, Phantom Of The Paradise (which at least has some killer original songs), You Should Have Left, Black Rock, Virus and the 1979 version of Jack The Ripper.

There were franchise stinkers past and present like Space Jam: A New Legacy, The Shaggy D.A., The Forever Purge, Escape Room: Tournament Of Champions, Bad Boys II, Bad Boys For Life, Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle and its 2019 remake.

There were brutally unfunny romantic comedies like Ghosts Of Girlfriends Past, Zack & Miri Make A Porno, How To Be Single, Little Black Book, The Lonely Guy, That Old Feeling, All About Steve, Her Alibi, The Pallbearer and Back To School. And then there was the falsely advertised Aspen Extreme and the badly aged Steven Seagal martial arts shooter Hard To Kill.

Overall, because of the immense difficulty I had with focus and concentration which needlessly prolonged the viewing of certain titles, not to mention stubborn perfectionism, screenings were down considerably compared to the past six years.

Not all the news was bad this year, though. Hits for the site are up slightly. Over 12000 page views compared to the roughly 9500 for 2020. 2021’s hit count is the highest since 2019 where there were just over 11000 but a far cry from the golden years in the middle of the last decade where annual page views were between 21000 and 40000.

As for shares, that’s up, too. There were more than 300 articles and reviews posted and shared by readers on Twitter and Facebook this year, bringing the current combined total since the start of the WordPress era 11 years ago to over 1750.

The most read piece of 2021 is eight years old. More Interesting Things I Learned While Watching The Fifth Season Of Seinfeld On DVD generated just under a thousand hits bringing its complete total to over 5300. A couple of 2014 pieces on Woody Allen continued to do well because they were unfortunately linked in an anti-Semitic rant by a kooky right wing blogger with a suspect political agenda. Because of that, April saw the biggest audience growth this year with over 2700 hits. So…thanks?

As another insidious variant of the Covid virus swoops in and expedites the infection process around the world and with the ominous rise of climate change continuing to devastate our planet, the future becomes ever more uncertain. It’s easy to despair at all the tragedy dominating the headlines as our normal lives continue to be put on hold. It’s easy to rage at incompetent governments and greedy pharmaceutical companies for putting capitalism ahead of human rights. God knows we have every right to feel this way.

It’s much harder to be hopeful. But we must. We cannot let fear dictate how we live, how we feel, and how we love. We cannot let the grifters on the right and sadly, the few on the left, as well, scare us out of our skepticism and basic decency. We must doubt questionable actions and beliefs and fight for those who need their voices amplified. We must always question bullshit and never swallow it whole. We must always know the truth whether it’s willingly shared with us or whether we have to sniff it out for ourselves.

Everything is extremely shitty right now but it won’t be that way forever. We must ride through these days of sorrow because, like the song says, there is a light that never goes out. It must never burn out.

As we struggle to navigate all these uncomfortable changes swirling around us, it’s best to find outlets of escape wherever and whenever we can. For me, that’s meant listening to a lot of music, especially all the dozens of CDs I bought this year, some of which I’ve been hunting for for years, sometimes decades.

It’s also meant diving deep into the cinematic archives even if that has meant deliberately suffering through an unhealthy amount of terrible movies. On the plus side, at least I have something to write about.

This I know for sure. The History Of The Mystery Track series will return. I was working on several more pieces during my mom’s extended hospitalization but none are remotely ready to be revealed in this space and who knows when they’ll be completed. There will obviously be more movie reviews and possibly more poems. It would be nice to offer more essays on various subjects. It would be even nicer to finally try my hand at original fiction, something I haven’t pursued in 20 years.

It has been a catastrophic year: for you, for me, for all of us. And 2022 may not bring the reprieve and the relief we are all desperately craving right now. But we must hang in there. We must not surrender. We must not resign. We must survive. And we will.

Happy New Year, everyone.

Dennis Earl
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Thursday, December 30, 2021
2:45 a.m.

Remembering 2021, My Sixteenth Year Of Blogging (Part One)

It happened again. Six days into the start of yet another miserably tumultuous new year, chaos disrupted the solitude. It was a shock to the system. The rage was palpable. I mean, the injustice of it all. It was difficult to concentrate on anything else.

Here I was all set to comment in real time on all the craziness happening and I couldn’t do it. Why? Because those fuckers at Twitter suspended me for the third time.

On January 5th, I wrote a critical tweet about James Comey, the former FBI Director who was peddling a new book. I objected to his assertion that the Justice Department shouldn’t pursue criminal cases against outgoing President Donald Trump because it would look too partisan. “What a fucking cunt,” I snorted.

The next day when I tried to get into my account, I was locked out. I had supposedly broken Twitter’s policy on “hateful conduct”. I mean I wasn’t trying to be nice but frankly, the comment was warranted.

Twitter disagreed. I appealed and heard nothing other than the usual automated emails acknowledging receipt.

Twitter Suspends Me For Calling James Comey A Naughty Word laid out the whole story the day of the suspension.

The Twitter Police may have disapproved but WordPress, God bless ’em, afforded me, as it always has, a more unfettered platform to repeatedly lambast an extremely privileged white guy and all the stupid shit he did when he held powerful government positions without any worry about being censored or punished. Basically, I got to repeatedly call James Comey a cunt in this space and it was glorious.

In a weird twist of irony, as I calmed down during my Twitter sentence, I ultimately found myself doing other things and being a bit more productive than usual. At the same time, I waited and waited for a response about my appeal. None was forthcoming. While doing a little research online, I discovered that some people have been waiting years to get their accounts back which remain frozen. Great.

After eight days of feeling resigned and deflated about taking a stand that meant nothing, I broke down, deleted the tweet and resumed wasting time on the least popular social media website.

Why I’m Ending My Appeal Of My Latest Wrongful Twitter Suspension explained my reasoning in the usual terse language while also opining on the massive temper tantrum that happened outside and inside the Capitol which had long petered out by that point. Having already tantrumed myself about my own annoying situation in the earlier piece, I went on to criticize Twitter’s highly dysfunctional appeal system. Unlike the overzealous Trump supporters who destroyed their lives for a lying idiot, my anger was more justified. Thankfully, there have been no further disruptions since.

Two months later, as the walls of scandal were closing in on the embattled New York Governor, I wrote about a cringy appearance he made on The Howard Stern Show. Embarrassing Quotes From Howard Stern’s April 13, 2020 Interview With Andrew Cuomo came about after discovering the transcript on the official New York State government website. (You can also hear the original conversation there.) It was not the only time he appeared on the program.

Stern is known for being overly gushy to questionable political figures but this particular segment stands out for being one of the most shameful displays of hero worship ever expressed on his long running radio show. I singled out the most egregious quotes which have aged rather badly.

Following Cuomo’s public resignation, Stern has barely mentioned him on the air. At least he didn’t invite him to his birthday party.

Speaking of media figures I used to admire, what the hell happened to Glenn Greenwald? Yes, it’s true. Despite willful blindness on my part, he’s always been an asshole, bitchy and ever combative while always ascribing the worst possible motives to those he detests. But, along with a whole slew of other things he got right, he also covered two of the most consequential stories of the last decade: Edward Snowden’s exposure of the NSA’s numerous mass surveillance programs and Operation Car Wash, the corrupt investigation that resulted in a coup fully blessed by Barack Obama in Brazil.

When Joe Biden was inaugurated as the 46th President of the United States, a whole lot of Americans expressed relief that Trump’s pathetic attempt to cling to power had utterly failed. New York Times journalist Lauren Wolfe was one of them. Known for his seething antipathy for the mainstream press when he feels they’re overly reverential, which sometimes gets overly personal and petty, Greenwald needlessly went after her hard on Twitter. When she got fired, he was blamed for drawing attention to her own tweet.

Shut Up, Bitch, a satirical poem written from his own prickly point of view, makes light of his thin-skinned defensiveness about the whole mess and his shameless self-promotion for his new venture, a Substack blog. Forever whiny despite coming into prominence through his best selling books and multiple columns on all things political, I also pointed out his constant aligning with the far right. I’m not the only one who finally tuned out his bullshit this year.

Slow Motion Genocide commented on America’s police state and the police abolition movement which continues to gain support as more innocent people, including young teenagers, continue to be murdered by law enforcement. Resentful is about the mentality of a mass shooter in a time when gun violence continues to be a national plague with no end in sight.

Other poems in 2021 were more personal. Partial Satisfaction reflects on my return to the chatroom in 2020 after staying away for nearly a year. The opening verse is based on a real exchange of DMs with a very strange person on Twitter who I had been friendly with for about half a decade. She acted very peculiarly during the course of the conversation, misinterpreting some of what I was saying, thinking I was hitting on her when I was just looking for advice about my non-existent love life. She discouraged me from going back to web chatting and I’m grateful that I ignored her.

Looking back on these old messages I had kept, I realized I had always been the comforter, the consoling rock whenever some calamity had befallen her. It wasn’t a healthy friendship and it was completely one-sided. She would bail in the middle of conversations, sometimes apologize later and then do it all over again. During our last exchange of messages, I even expressed remorse for upsetting her when it was all her problem and not mine. After not hearing from her for days, I finally cut the cord and blocked her. I do not miss her. She’s a mess I no longer want to clean up.

As for my return to the chatroom last Christmas week, I had some fun sexy times as usual but with Flash disappearing at the start of the year, I made the most of my limited time in one of the oldest sites still standing. Although I tried getting in through the new modern version, albeit to no avail, I haven’t chatted in this capacity since I left for the last time. Maybe it’s time to finally move on. To this day, I have never met anyone from these places in the real world. Perhaps that’s for the best.

Speaking of that, time for another rant. Back in high school, I became friendly with a guy who for a short time was my movie buddy. We had a regular routine for trips to the downtown cinema. I’d meet him at the bus stop close to his house, he’d walk up to greet me and then we were off to see a number of pictures over the course of about seven or eight months during our third year attending classes together.

I remember one time I asked if he wanted see another movie and as usual he said yes. But when I went to meet him at our usual spot, he was a no-show. So I went by myself. The next time I saw him at school, I asked him where he was. He acted surprised claiming I never asked him to hang out with me in the first place. But he made it up to me by treating me to a double feature the day I won the Student Council Presidency.

During the summer break, we continued to see the odd film (I also went with other friends and by myself) until one day I called him and if memory serves, he didn’t want to go anymore. So I stopped asking him.

After graduation, I would continue to run into him from time to time usually at a mall and our encounters were always warm and never awkward. (I didn’t hold a grudge.) After college, I started volunteering at Cable 14 and there he was working a number of jobs behind the scenes. In this space about 14 years ago, despite not really hanging out anymore, I still considered him a “good friend”. Looking back, that was a gross overstatement on my part. He was barely an acquaintance.

Having not seen him around in years, when I joined Facebook in 2007, we reconnected but we barely messaged each other. I didn’t really relate to him anymore. He had become very politically conservative.

Three years later, I signed in and discovered he had unfriended me. A mutual friend asked me what was going on because she was unfriended, as well. No explanation was ever offered, although she suggested maybe he decided to drop me because we didn’t talk that much anymore. I don’t think that was the reason.

Anyway, about four months later, he suddenly refriended me and demanded I stop writing my many “dark and depressing poems” which I considered a genuine insult. No one tells me what I can’t write here. And besides, why did he suddenly care about my blog after ditching me for all that time?

He also expressed an interest in wanting to work on something with me but he never did say what he had in mind, not that I enjoy collaborating which is a giant pain in the ass. At that point, he was working behind the scenes in the news department of a major Canadian TV network. I don’t know if he’s still there.

I’m trying to remember now when he said this other thing that pissed me off. There was a moment where it looked like we were going to get together and catch up in the real world. He said whenever I leave my house, we can meet. I said anytime is good. No, he responded. I mean you need to move out of your family home before I’ll see you. What the fuck? Finally reaching my breaking point, I blocked him.

But that would not be the last time I would hear from him. No longer running into him out in public because he moved out of the city, he then emailed me to ask me something or other. I don’t remember what the questions were but it was odd that he never mentioned me no longer being on his Facebook friends list. I answered him because not doing so would’ve made me obsessive and distracted. I just wanted him to go away so after responding, I blocked the two email addresses I knew he was using.

When The Huffington Post published my piece on the 2014 Toronto Mayoralty election, there he was leaving a comment, correcting my work. This time, I didn’t respond. Then, sometime after, he started following me on Twitter. I couldn’t hit the mute button fast enough. Looking back, I should’ve just blocked his annoying ass.

Many peaceful years went by and I never once thought about him. Then came this past April. Out of nowhere, he left a comment asking me about my work situation and how I was making money. I was so fucking angry.

No “Hello, how have you been?” No apologies. No respect for my boundaries. His phony tone was too friendly and oblivious about our past. I had taken a break watching a terrible movie (which I eventually finished although I went back to rescreen certain sequences) and now I was distracted again. Why won’t he leave me alone?

After stewing over this for a day, I decided to post the comment and just not reply to it. Things settled down for a bit. But then over the course of a week I realized this was me being passive aggressive and it was no real solution at all. Not only I was aggravated by his unwelcome presence on my site, I was equally peeved by his presumptuousness. Commenters can tick a box that will notify them of any responses to their postings (they’ll get an automated message) and sure enough, he was expecting an answer. He didn’t become a blog follower, he only wanted to follow responses to his own goddamn comment.

It remains the only time he has ever made an appearance here. After a week of quietly raging, I did some snooping online and learned some things. First of all, he’s a massive poster. I found tens of thousands of comments on the CBC website alone. Secondly, he’s no longer on Facebook or Twitter. It turns out I’m not the only one who finds him irritating. Not sure if he was suspended or simply deactivated, but he can’t pester me on those sites anymore.

I noticed that he had a new email address so I promptly blocked it. In the end, I realized I couldn’t stand to look at his comment so first I spammed it then just flat out deleted it. Finally, I blocked him from the site or at least I think I did. Despite the relief of this welcome erasure, I continued to be angry but knew that the best way to let go of these feelings was to write more poetry.

The defiant Enjoy The Depression sums up the whole disappointing saga, the title a direct reference to his knock on my previous poems. I’ll write as many “dark and depressing” things as I goddamn please, you fucking fraud. The Asshole Returns began as a diatribe against him but ultimately expanded into the world of trolling in general.

Still seething, I then wrote I Have Contempt For You which directly references my decision to delete his attempt at concern trolling. I eventually calmed down for a time but when I started obsessing again I wrote Bitch In Denial and finally Unresolved Tension to soothe my offended soul. The concluding couplet of the latter, “There is no solution/There is only letting go”, points out that I have no intention of talking to him ever again and that it’s ridiculous to keep thinking about someone you can’t stand. I hope he never bothers me again. Eight and a half months later, so far so good.

Dennis Earl
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Thursday, December 30, 2021
2:14 a.m.

Space Jam: A New Legacy

25 years ago, Warner Brothers tried to turn Michael Jordan into a movie star. The NBA legend had already hosted an episode of Saturday Night Live and appeared in a bunch of Nike commercials, so, surely, a feature film was the natural next step in his media evolution.

Space Jam made a lot of money but it wasn’t particularly good. With its contrived, gimmicky premise and inconsistent laughs, like me, most critics not from Chicago were unimpressed. (Even though it covers far less ground than The Last Dance, I preferred his all-too-brief 2000 IMAX doc At The Max which I finally had a look at earlier this year on DVD.) Despite being the launching point for an extremely lucrative merchandising brand, Jordan has never made another fictional feature.

25 years later, Warner is trying again with LeBron James, another mega-successful NBA talent destined to be a legend in his own right. He, too, hosted an episode of SNL and appeared in a bunch of TV ads but unlike Jordan, James already appeared onscreen in a movie, the hit comedy Trainwreck which is worse than the original Space Jam. But James won over most other critics with his supporting performance, giving him a distinct advantage over Jordan.

After many attempts to revive the franchise, Space Jam: A New Legacy finally surfaced this past summer. It is a bewildering work of shameless self-indulgence, a laughless, bloated monstrosity doubling as a pathetic infomercial for much of the Warner Brothers catalogue, like anyone is unaware of their biggest titles and iconic characters. A massive ego trip for its executive producer/star, it takes too long to tell a story that is far too familiar.

One of the few good things about the movie is Wood Harris. During a flashback sequence when a fictional James (Stephen Kankole) is a young teenager obsessed with Looney Tunes, Harris, in an all-too-brief cameo, plays his no-nonsense high school coach who insists he put down the Game Boy and get his head back in the game. Surely one can play video games and still be an exceptional baller, but whatever.

I do question the bit where Harris declares young LeBron a “once-in-a-lifetime generational talent” and “the best player he’s ever coached” when he’s only 13 and not yet the dunking master he would become. Even Michael Jordan didn’t have that said about him in the previous installment. Like a guy who calls himself King James needs anymore fluffing. Still, the commanding Harris is effective here, tough but sympathetic towards his young protege whose single mom can’t attend all his games because she’s working so much to keep her broken family afloat, not unlike the real story.

Then comes the opening title sequence that overemphasizes all the positives in the real LeBron’s career without pointing out the numerous missteps like the ridiculous press conference where he cruelly announced his first departure from Cleveland. To make up for this omission later on, there’s a lazy dig about his lack of team loyalty. (“Watch out Lakers…”)

Now in the present time, the onscreen James is married with a young daughter and two teenage sons (which mirrors his real life but with the names changed), the oldest Darius (Ceyair J. Wright) who hopes to play ball himself and the other Dominic (Cedric Joe) who would rather be a video game designer.

Dom Ball, his game-in-progress, is basically a full-court Jordan Vs. Bird with a dumb “style points” gimmick where you can score more than the usual 2 or 3 points if you perform, among other things, a fanciful dunk.

Not only is the name self-important (Dumb Ball is more like it), the game is too dark with the exception of the players and the style add-ons which at least exhibit bright visuals. Imagine a major company unveiling this lame offering with a straight face. If Dominic wasn’t LeBron James’s son, no one would give a shit. This is a very privileged family, spoiled beyond belief.

This causes tension between father and son because LeBron is a humourless hard-ass who wants his middle child to take basketball more seriously just like his high school coach. His wife (Sonequa Martin-Green), doing her best June Cleaver, urges her husband to stop being so hard on The Beaver. It takes him the whole two-hour movie to predictably accept his son’s stupid dream.

Meanwhile, the onscreen version of Warner Bros. Studios urges LeBron to attend a media presentation put forth by the company’s artificial intelligence Al. G Rhythm (a dapper but unconvincing Don Cheadle). Space Jam: A New Legacy is already off to a bad start with the routine family conflicts but the introduction of this bad-punned villain with the self-defeating agenda into the mix is a horrendous botch and suddenly we’re going downhill fast.

Al. G pitches the idea of LeBron being inserted into already existing Warner properties like Harry Potter and Game Of Thrones. Expecting an enthusiastic yes, LeBron states the obvious. This is an awful idea. No thanks. (lronically, the movie uses it itself on multiple occasions hypocritically proving its star’s point.) G becomes enraged and decides to lay a trap.

I love how this temperamental algorithm who rules over the awkwardly named Serververse, where all of Warners’ famous characters live on segregated franchise planets (good God), can manipulate technology, imitate voices, send emails and even transport humans into his electronic underworld but he can’t escape it unlike the Looney Tune characters at the end of the movie. He can transform them from 2D animated figures into 3D CGIs but cannot turn himself into a human in the Earth world. His G-rated villainy has limits, apparently.

Desperately wanting credit for his shitty ideas, he now wants revenge. Having already kidnapped an oblivious Dominic, he proposes a possible out for LeBron. They’ll each lead a basketball team in a match. If LeBron’s squad gets the duke, he gets his son back and they can go home. But if he loses, they stay in this fantasy realm forever. I thought he wanted credit, not more company besides Pete. This scenario doesn’t make any sense.

Buttering up Dominic so he can have access to his game code and list of scanned professionals, Al. G puts the kid in his starting line-up so that it’ll be father vs. son in the drawn out, suspenseless finale. It takes almost the entire film for the young lad to realize he’s been had. I thought he was supposed to be smart.

For some reason, Al. G creates a streaming app that will send not only ordinary citizens including LeBron’s family and best friend Malik into the Serververse, all of whom will also stay imprisoned here if the 4-time NBA Champion doesn’t pull through. (G must be really lonely.) He’ll also invite famous Warner characters like King Kong and Pennywise to sit in the audience, like they give a goddamn about bastardized basketball. Two announcers are kidnapped to do the play-by-play but they don’t add anything of merit to these already tedious proceedings.

It’s true that it’s more fun to play a video game yourself than to watch others engage and that’s exactly what it’s like watching this pointless affair which also feels far more like the Looney Tunes cartoon it wants to be rather than a proper game of basketball.

Seeking out all the best superheroes to join his squad, LeBron is saddled with a lonely Bugs Bunny and all his underdog friends instead, plus Lola Bunny, the only other member who can actually play. Basically, the same team from the first Space Jam, minus Bill Murray. To find them, Bugs and LeBron steal Marvin The Martian’s spaceship and land on a bunch of franchise planets where the missing Looney Tunes have been lured by Al. G to insert themselves in existing film hits like The Matrix and animated comic books like Wonder Woman.

I wonder what Roger Ebert would’ve thought of Yosemite Sam playing the piano in Casablanca and telling a major character he related a lot to her “emotional baggage.”

Trying to teach basic fundamentals to cartoons who’ve already won a high stakes game where their freedom was at stake and when the key to winning Dom Ball is regularly employing unorthodox style antics that is their stock and trade further lengthens an already tired story, especially when a stubborn LeBron discourages the latter. That is, until half time when they’re down by an absurd amount of points and need a series of Hail Marys to even make it close.

Speaking of the break, here’s how out of touch this film is. At one point, we’re led to believe that Michael Jordan is here and he may very well join the action in the second half which would easily reverse the Tune Squad’s miserable misfortunes and allow the aligning of two superstars on the same team for the first time. But no, it’s not him. Before the swerve is even revealed, you know it won’t be him. This isn’t funny, it’s insulting. A chance to liven things up is foolishly not taken for a cheap gag.

As the game winds down in the second half, with the Tune Squad predictably bouncing back from potential oblivion, there’s the obligatory moment where Dominic finally accepts the truth about his new mentor, switches teams and suggests the winning play with one point separating the squads and just ten seconds left on the clock. Gee I wonder if this will all be slowed down for dramatic effect despite knowing full well the expected outcome.

A New Legacy attempts to shoehorn in a last-minute tragedy with a major character supposedly making a huge sacrifice for the sake of all the trapped but this isn’t Transformers and you know they’ll be just fine in the film’s final scene.

Despite not doing as well as hoped, a third Space Jam is in the works, this one possibly starring The Rock with the basketball setting being replaced with professional wrestling. Having seen WWE superstars mix it up with the Scooby Doo gang (seen in the background during the Dom Ball event) in a witless made-for-video debacle a while ago, maybe it’s time to take this old dog behind the barn and shoot it dead already.

Dennis Earl
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Tuesday, December 21, 2021
3:00 a.m.

Escape Room: Tournament Of Champions

It starts with a mysterious delivery, a fancy black contraption hiding an alluring proposal.  Come on down, solve some puzzles and win ten grand.

If this invitation to easy money sounds too good to be true, it is.  Your submission to greed will almost assuredly shorten your life.  For these puzzles are not harmless jigsaws and fun brain teasers.  They are death traps.  Only the adept will survive.

That was the premise of the original Escape Room which transformed the popular real-life phenomenon into a financially viable low-budget horror franchise even if it didn’t quite hold together artistically.

The best thing about it was Taylor Russell, the doe-eyed, innocent-looking protagonist with a shy, sometimes hesitant soft voice but an indefatigably sly intelligence.  If I ever find myself in a dire situation like this, I’d want her on my team.

Her Zoey, one of two survivors from the original group of six, remains troubled at the start of Tournament Of Champions, the apparent middle chapter of a possible trilogy.

During a shrink session, she reminds us of a personal tragedy.  She survived a plane crash but her mother didn’t.  She’s remained grounded ever since.

Struggling with night terrors over the recapped events of the first film, she declares war on Minos, the faceless corporation responsible for organizing these underground hunger games.  Zoey will not rest until they’re brought to justice.

Along with fellow survivor Ben (Logan Miller), instead of flying to New York City like her suspicious doctor suggests, they drive there hoping to directly confront this ever elusive organization face-to-face.

What they actually get is a seemingly abandoned building and a determined thief who leads them into the subway where they get stuck in the last car on the line.  As they regroup on the train vowing to try again later, they notice only four other passengers.

And then their car derails.  It’s happening all over again.

Like themselves, the others have also survived the escape room experience albeit off-camera.  (They too have found themselves unwittingly led here.) Minos never forgets and the games don’t end until they say they do.

Before, not enough time was spent getting to know and care about the characters trapped in these anguished scenarios.  And now here are four more whose expected disappearances aren’t all that upsetting.

There’s the chronically tardy guy whose girlfriend will have to celebrate her birthday alone this year, a travel blogger, a drunken priest who thinks God is looking out for him and a punky gal who can’t feel pain.

In the first film, the victims had to avoid getting burned, frozen, drowned, being squished by book cases and falling from an upside down bar.

This time, the winners of previous contests have to look out for quicksand, bolts of electricity, hot lasers and intermittent rounds of acid rain.  In other words, same unscary shit, different unappetizing smell.

Like much safer escape rooms in real life, they have to look for clues to get to the exit.  Along the way, their numbers start to dwindle.  If you get impatient because the clock is ticking, you get hurt.  If you’re too slow, say goodnight, Gracie.

Although they all work well as a team, it’s usually Zoey who plays a major role in their advancement as she determines the missing piece of the puzzle.

This round of escape rooms follows a pattern that mystifies our hero but she knows deep down means something important.  A clue is given during the shrink session as Zoey remembers a conversation she had with someone who would not survive the first movie.

By the time she gets to the last challenge, it’s all put together by a fake diary entry.  And lo and behold, her friend she’s been mourning all this time isn’t really dead at all.

Yeah, about that, come on.  Are the Minos folks really that lazy that they have to force one of their failed contestants to devise an entire game around her own kidnapped daughter?  How does that work?  Are there pitch meetings with the builders so that everything’s up to snuff?  How does a panicked mom deliver the goods to please her corporate captors?  Give me a break.

From that opening scene following the recap, the entire movie sets up the predictable idea that Zoey’s entire life now revolves around this endless game of cheating death.  She’s never given a moment’s peace.  Already obsessed with ending this criminal syndicate’s lucrative betting enterprise, she’s smart enough to stay on high alert at all times.  It has never served her wrong.

During the beach sequence, she thinks she’s found an illegal exit, one not connected to the next level of the games.  But upon hearing street sounds, along with a fellow contestant, they climb up to street level only to realize it’s time to solve another goddamn puzzle with another survivor who took the preferred exit.

And indeed, this scenario plays out yet again in the very last scene.  I question Zoey’s sudden lack of fear about something that has plagued her for years.  And I also wonder how deep the Minos conspiracy actually runs and how it could possibly go undetected in plain sight for so long.

One thing this movie does get right.  Cops are useless and are an integral part of the corruption.

Stripping aside the twist connecting all the puzzles together, Escape Room: Tournament Of Champions is essentially the same movie as its predecessor and therefore suffers from the same inadequacies.

It’s hard not to think of this series as a loose cross between Saw and Hostel even if it is thankfully far less grotesque and a bit more cerebral.  I appreciate that it’s not gruesome by design.  All the deaths depicted here are mercifully bloodless. (However, based on what’s revealed here, be very suspicious of disappearances. If there’s no body, there’s a hidden agenda.)

But if you’re not going the gory route, you better have intensity on your side.  Despite all the close calls that Zoey and the remaining combatants face to just barely get to the next round of psychological torture, I just didn’t care.

I didn’t care because I’m not given a real reason to.  I like Zoey but have no doubt she will remain the lead in however many sequels are coming because there’s no impossible task she can’t complete in an instant.  There’s no suspense in a scene with her in it.  Almost everybody else is pretty much disposable.

One of the many reasons the original Halloween has retained its power for so many decades is because it gave us heroes and victims to care about.  We get to know them before they’re put in danger.  They’re funny and sweet and rebellious. We root for their survival at every turn and mourn the ones who don’t make it.

The characters in the Escape Room movies might as well be avatars in an actual video game, a more fitting forum for this franchise. They’re not fully developed human beings at all, just one-note pawns in a black market capitalist scheme, one that the New Founding Fathers Of America probably wish they’d devised themselves.

I mentioned how much this series reminds me of Saw and Hostel. But as I write, I’m also reminded of the Final Destination franchise and the constant idea that you can’t avoid the inevitable no matter how many times you escape unscathed, an idea that was taken to such a level of absurdity that were it not for the extreme violence it would’ve become a self-parody.

In the final scene of Tournament Of Champions, Zoey, in a sobering moment of clarity, realizes in a matter of seconds that Minos has been several steps ahead of her this entire time. Will she ever be truly free? After watching yet another weak horror sequel, I’m wondering the same thing.

Dennis Earl
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Tuesday, December 21, 2021
1:48 a.m.

Hard To Kill (1990)

Long before he got fat and outed as a creep, Steven Seagal was at one time the heir apparent to Arnold Schwarzenegger’s lucrative action throne.  With his menacing glare, sleepy-eyed whisper and slicked back ponytail, he most certainly looked the part. But he was also legit.

He could slap you in the face, clothesline you off your feet and stab you in the throat with a pool cue, break your hands and twist your legs until the bones snapped.  He could choke you out and blast you with as many bullets as his shotgun could hold.  And somehow never be out of breath. He was the zen master of mayhem.

In his second feature, Hard To Kill, he plays a cop who knows too much.  A corrupt politician (the always awesome William Sadler sadly underutilized here) makes a secret deal with a mob boss to take out an old sitting Senator so he can take his seat in Congress. In exchange, he’ll protect them despite being publicly tough-on-crime.  They somehow make it look like an accidental plane crash.

The meeting takes place outdoors late at night on Oscar night 1983 under the watchful eye of Seagal who secretly videos the entire exchange while being annoyed he’s missing the ceremony. 

“I thought this dock was clean!” a worried Sadler bemoans out loud after the discovery of that pesky Aikido expert who makes a smooth exit. You’d think the guy would pick a more secure location and learn to talk in code and not use his famous political catchphrase. Oh, and stay in the darkness.

Married with a young son, you know in two seconds what’s going to happen next.  The wife gets murdered, the son manages to escape out the window and Seagal, despite taking a bunch of hits, barely clings to life. 

He spends the next seven years in a coma where nurse Kelly Le Brock develops a creepy crush on him.  There’s the obligatory scene where she takes a peek under the covers and openly admires what she sees.  (She was briefly married to Seagal in real life.)  And another where she goes even further making a bad pun straight out of the David Zucker playbook.

When she finally leaves him alone, upon reflecting upon past events in his sleep, his heart rate doubles and he suddenly awakens, a Festivus miracle.

Even though the world believes Seagal is dead (with the exception of his wife, he and his son had staged funerals), the now Senator Sadler, appointed then elected and with bigger ambitions to become the next Vice President, learns the truth thanks to dirty cops on his payroll.

One of his hired hitmen shows up passing for a doctor where he is able to kill a security guard who pays for his suspicion and a physical therapist for his kindness but, of course, not Seagal because, remember, he’s hard to kill.  It should be pointed out that our hero is very weak and speaks in an even softer whisper than normal, although you’d be hard pressed to know the difference.

While lying on a gurney he manages to get into an elevator where the race is on to avoid getting terminated.  Using only the handle of a mop, Seagal manages to be just a little bit quicker than his more able-bodied adversary by pressing the right buttons at the right time. Apparently, comas don’t diminish your reflexes.

After a returning Le Brock discovers the dead bodies of her work colleagues, she catches up with Seagal who has been warning her this whole time that it’s not safe for him to be here.  She may be klutzy but she’s a fast driver and they manage to retreat to a large estate with a lot of acreage and beautiful scenery.  Le Brock’s housesitting because the owner is doing some research in China for six months.  He won’t be happy with how the place looks by the end of the movie.

For some reason, there’s a horse running around and a Buddhist prayer room.  With a silly-looking goatee that he clearly didn’t grow on his own, Seagal has plenty of time to shave, recuperate and train for the vengeful violence to come.  A little too much time, if you ask me. This movie’s a bit light on the asskicking.

Meanwhile, an increasingly desperate Sadler tells his boys to smear Seagal in the media by somehow blaming him for the murders in the hospital which in the real world would lead to some serious skepticism considering the weakened condition of “Coma Cop”.  As he recovers, Seagal, wrongly believed to be part of some cocaine ring because of some planted bags, calls one such gullible TV reporter who nonetheless dutifully relays his message of innocence on the air.

As long as they stay on this sprawling estate, no one will touch them.  But Le Brock makes the mistake of visiting a work colleague at her apartment only to learn she’s been murdered, too.  Sadler’s goons catch a break and they follow her back to Seagal who manages to sneak in a visit to his dead wife’s grave the night before without being followed or detected.  (There’s a fake one for his son.  But where’s his?) So much for 24-hour surveillance.

In the middle of packing for their next departure, here come the villains right on cue. A familiar pattern emerges. Goons with automatic weapons waste a lot of bullets causing only property damage and when they stop to reload, Seagal springs up and pops ’em with his shotgun. Any lingerers without guns get busted up and left with broken parts all while much the estate looks like the aftermath of a ransacking.

I love how Sadler acts more like a mob boss in his own right than a sitting elected official. (He has his own lavish estate: the house that corruption built.) There he is in one scene very annoyed when the tainted police captain rushes up to him and his topless date in the hot tub to lay out the bad news. No ballet for you, toots. Get lost.

In the meantime, Seagal needs to track down the only person on the force he trusts, a retired cop named O’Malley (Frederick Coffin, the maligned traffic cop from Wayne’s World) who manages to secure the audio portion of the infamous dock meeting while Coma Cop is in the ER. He’s been raising Seagal’s son who doesn’t know his dad is still around until the truth is finally expressed.

O’Malley’s not an easy guy to find and so Le Brock is called into action. She ends up unwittingly speaking to his mom at some retirement place and after seven long years, the two old friends on the LAPD have a warm, private reunion. It’ll be the last time they ever see each other. Should’ve worn a disguise at the train station.

It’s difficult to get super excited about a story that pretty much gives away its ending through its title but 31 years ago, when I first saw Hard To Kill on full-screen tape, I did kind of like it. Today, I more readily see its flaws which are not overcompensated at all by the mostly routine action sequences.

There’s a humourless cockiness to Seagal, especially in the scenes where he puts down his weapon and decides to use either his fists or a pool cue on multiple foes who never rush him all at once. He points out how unfair it is that he’s armed and his opponents are not, like the little lippy Latino wine store robber he gets down on his knees to subdue.

Speaking of that whole sequence, you gotta love how Seagal waits until the poor owner gets blasted before he actually does anything. At no time does he check on the old man’s condition. It’s not even clear if he survived the attack. We just see him gurneyed up into an ambulance.

Could an actual politician get away with the crimes Sadler commits for as long as he does? Based on how everything plays out here, maybe, although he’s not at all discreet. After doing a stump speech, there he is making demands of his loyal minions all within earshot of anyone who cares to listen.

I like how it’s not one rogue cop aligning with the Senator but pretty much the entire LAPD minus O’Malley and Seagal. There’s a scene where O’Malley explains to his old partner how his investigation into Sadler was regularly sabotaged and stymied (they went after his mother), and how his unrelenting frustration led to an early retirement.

Which doesn’t explain the final scene where suddenly Seagal is believed by the same corrupt police force but Sadler, their wealthy benefactor, is not. Guess he didn’t buy off everybody. It would’ve been much more impactful (and truthful) if we saw the incriminating videotape and cassette put through an industrial shredder. And Sadler sworn in as Vice President.

Hard To Kill plays itself more or less seriously but has some extremely ridiculous moments. It takes a long time for Seagal to finally connect Sadler to the tape he made even though he knows his catchphrase. When he finally has his eureka moment, this is what he says about it:

“I’m gonna take to you to the bank, Senator. The blood bank!”

Does this mean he’s going to help him make a donation or something? Thankfully, when he finally confronts him hiding in one of his closets, he just puts a rifle in his mouth and kicks him in the nuts.

In the build-up to the finale, Seagal learns what the villains already know. Nobody in this movie has a security system and therefore, you can just sneak right in undetected any time you want. It happens so often it becomes its own cliche.

Even sillier is what happens after Seagal infiltrates Senator Sadler’s expansive residence. Following another ass whooping on some pool-loving goons, including the one who popped his wife, Seagal has so much free time on his hands he leaves this message written in lipstick for the corrupt police captain too busy cleaning himself up to find:

“ANTICIPATING DEATH IS WORSE THAN DEATH ITSELF.”

And then later, as the now panicked policeman runs out with his trusty pistol, he sees this on a wall:

“YOU’RE NEXT.”

What is he, Goldberg?

Surely, these laughs are unintentional. Anyway, it’s all a bluff anyway since Seagal himself knows the captain and the Senator cannot be killed because the restoration of his reputation is entirely dependent not only on their exposure on the tapes but also on them actually serving prison sentences. Therefore, assassinations are completely out of the question. Score one for the rule of law.

This is another one of those action thrillers where the villains leave themselves so open to getting caught you’re always surprised it takes forever for this to happen, regardless of all their institutional protection. The scene where the hitman arrives at the coma centre posing as a physician is a case in point. It isn’t until he’s already lurking about disappointed in Seagal’s abandoned room that the security guard confronts him only to get a bullet for his nosiness.

Imagine how much smarter this would’ve been if the hitman had assumed an actual doctor’s identity years earlier to the point where all he had to do was surreptitiously poison his nemesis and merely walk away unnoticed.

In the more than 30 years since its release, like Hard To Kill itself it’s hard not to think of the decline in the real Seagal’s own reputation. As far back as Jenny McCarthy’s memoir, it’s been well known he’s not kind to women, that he doesn’t respect boundaries, so it’s weird now seeing him in consensual on-screen love scenes complete with ass grabbing. In a moment that plays a whole lot differently today, Seagal and his wife have a conversation before having sex.

At one point, she says, “I’m not scared of you.”

To which her husband replies, “Maybe you should be.”

The most revealing moment of his entire career.

Dennis Earl
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Tuesday, December 7, 2021
1:45 a.m.

Black Rock (2013)

When Black Rock begins, Sarah (Kate Bosworth) and Lou (Lake Bell) are excited.  These old girlfriends are about to relive their happy childhoods camping on a tiny, remote wooded island not far from a sparsely populated seaside town.

But then they spot Abby (director Katie Aselton).  Lou is not pleased.  Sarah neglected to inform her of the additional party.  And when Abby sees Lou (short for Louise), the feeling is quite mutual.  She wasn’t informed of her presence, either.

It takes a fake terminal cancer diagnosis and a bit of real convincing on the part of Kate to get them on a motorboat to make their way to the island.  But the tension remains.

Nearly 20 minutes into the movie, as they all hunt for their buried time capsule from 20 years earlier (Sarah made a crude map), Lou and Abby exchange heated words about an “indiscretion” that changed everything.  It’s been six years and although Abby has since married another man, she’s still angry about her former friend’s drunken mistake.

After they give up the search, they retreat to their beachside campsite where Lou makes her umpteenth attempt at a reconciliation.  Right in the middle of it, Abby screams.  The girls have company.  Amongst the suddenly appearing trio, Lou recognizes the guy with the beard.  She attended school with his older brother.  They’re all invited to hang out for a campfire chit chat.

Up to this point, besides some tranquil, idyllic scenery and at least one catchy Kills song (the second one, not the distracting opener during the car scene), Black Rock has had really only one thing going for it, the Abby/Lou dispute which briefly livens up the otherwise unfunny immature banter of the heroes.  These are good looking dames, yes, but we don’t really care about them.  They’re not very bright.

Because this is a horror film, there’s something quite off about the men they’ve just met.  All are recent war veterans who openly admit, but with carefully chosen language, to atrocities against Muslims in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

Not helping matters is a drunken Abby who is all over the bearded guy.  She gets so embarrassing with her overt flirtations that Sarah has to pull her aside to calm her down.  But she is smitten.  Or maybe in her vulnerable state, she’s actually trying to make herself feel better.  (“I’m not an uptight bitch,” she mutters out loud at one point.)  It turns out all is not well in her marriage.

Abby eventually lures bearded guy up top away from everyone else and it’s go time.  But suddenly, she doesn’t feel well.  He doesn’t stop.  He deliberately trips her.  She lands hard on the back of her head.  When he won’t stop pawing her, she smacks him.  He hits her back repeatedly.  She has no choice but to end this.  Good thing that rock is within reach.

Screaming for help, everyone rushes up the mountain.  The men are pissed at what they see and take out their violent frustrations on all the women effectively knocking them out.  It is at this precise moment that Black Rock gets very dumb and derivative.

One of the men, who could easily have been recruited by ISIS, wants to murder them, actually behead them, for what happened to his friend.  But his compadre tries to talk him out of it.  When the women come to the next morning, they find themselves tied up wondering how to get out of this mess.

You have to remember that these are soldiers who had no hesitation in committing war crimes overseas.  As one of them openly admits, they were “dishonourably discharged”.  So why is the psychotic one so easily manipulated?

After Sarah fails to talk sense into him (even she has to be kidding herself about going to the police), a bold Abby calls him a “fucking pussy” for even considering the idea of killing them all while they’re unable to properly defend themselves.  Why would he care how he kills them? Was he this neurotic in the Middle East?

This stupid son of a bitch then frees Sarah thinking he’ll just beat her up some more before finishing her off.  But that gives the other girls just enough time to untie themselves.  In an instant, all three are on the move wisely separating to go off in all different directions.  The psycho is rightly reprimanded by his buddy who calls him a “fucking moron”.  Now he wants to kill them, too.

As psycho soldier loudly and repeatedly declares his homicidal intentions the women eventually reconvene and come up with a doomed escape plan.  In a bit of unexpected irony, the most vocal critic of it is the one who gets popped.  Why would you make all that goddamn noise, you fool?

Now down to two and freezing their naked asses off, albeit all too briefly and with no impromptu lesbianism to heat them up faster, the survivors belatedly come to a conclusion they should’ve reached a whole lot sooner.  They are very fortunate that their adversaries are even more daft.

Black Rock divided critics upon its original theatrical run in 2013.  Mercifully running a mere 80 minutes, it’s still too long.  Contrived and stretched from the start, its overly patient villains make too many boneheaded decisions and are too inconsistent to take seriously. Like James Bond’s many enemies, they often talk too much giving the heroes plenty of time to exit a dangerous dilemma. It’s a genuine shock when they actually do kill one of the girls.

The movie doesn’t do a particularly good job of making us care about the women from the outset. The weak humour, their juvenile behaviour, the boring time capsule, all that questionable decision making. You know the feud between Lou and Abby will end at some point but only because it has to. You can’t survive together if you still hold a grudge.

Speaking of that boring time capsule, an unidentified VHS tape? A conveniently preserved Swiss army knife? This is why they came back here? Considering how everything ends, the past should’ve stayed buried.

Dennis Earl
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Friday, December 3, 2021
2:46 a.m.