At Least It Wasn't an HOA

Film: The Perfect Neighbor
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on Fire!

There are too many stories where people of color who are not a threat or acting in a threatening manner are nonetheless gunned down by the police. What we don’t hear about as much, aside from particularly celebrated cases, is the people who are shot as a result of “stand your ground” laws. By some estimates, 700 or more people are killed using this law every year, and particularly in the cases of white people shooting Black people, they get away with it. The Perfect Neighbor explores one such case.

This doesn’t merely explore the situation in question, though. Rather than interview the children of the woman who was killed, or have a roundtable discussion with the neighbors, The Perfect Neighbor uses bodycam and police interrogation room footage to tell the story. This is literally a story told in the words of the people who experienced it, filtered only by what is included in the edit. There’s nothing cleaned up here—no language or action, no matter how ugly or unsettling.

Love for Sale

Film: Rental Family
Format: Streaming video from Hulu Plus on Fire!

Brendan Fraser seems like one of those people who is genuinely a nice person. He’s the kind of person who I want to see succeed; he seems like someone who would be fun to hang out with, or have dinner with. When I first saw the trailer for Rental Family, I was of two minds. First, I thought it looked like the sort of film that Fraser should be doing—a drama with a great deal of heart, but it also looked like a film designed to capitalize on Fraser’s recent resurgence and Oscar win. But I also knew that I would be unable to resist watching it.

This is important for Rental Family, because this is a film that only works if we like Brendan Fraser. Well, we need to like his character. This is very much a film about empathy, and getting to that is going to be hampered if we have none for the main character.

You Saw Me Standin' Alone

Film: Blue Moon
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on Fire!

When people talk about very talented actors, people who are genuinely and consistently good at the craft, Ethan Hawke doesn’t get mentioned enough. Hawke feels (to me) like one of those actors who goes into every job like it’s the one that’s going to make his career. He commits, and he’s good to great in pretty much everything he’s been in, at least that I’ve seen (and I even forgive him for The Purge). I was happy to see that he was nominated for an Oscar, his third acting nomination and first for lead. Blue Moon hinges entirely on Ethan Hawke’s performance. This film is him, and he is the film, even with a good supporting cast.

Blue Moon is a memoir of sorts of Lorenz “Larry” Hart (Hawke), the lyricist half of Rodgers and Hart, who wrote a number of Broadway musicals over the course of a couple of decades. Hart’s decline came about not from rumors of his sexuality (he was what we would today probably call pansexual), but his copious drinking. Rodgers, needing a more consistent partner for his music, teamed up with Oscar Hammerstein to make the greatest musical composition team ever, starting with their first collaboration, Oklahoma!

A Boy and His...Zombie?

Film: Fido
Format: Streaming video from Tubi TV on Fire!

The movie Fido tanked at the box office in 2006, and I think there’s a specific reason for it that has nothing to do with the actual quality of the film. The problem is that Fido is a spoof of a type of movie that is no longer made. This is a zombie film, which puts it firmly in the horror camp, but much more than that, this is a parody of Lassie movies, just with a zombie instead of a collie. The kid in this is even named Timmy.

Fido takes place in an alternate timeline in what looks like the 1950s. Because of space radiation, the dead come back to life as flesh-eating ghouls, which caused a worldwide war against the undead. The radiation still plagues the planet, and the newly dead also return as zombies unless they are quickly cremated or decapitated. Many people, though, are neither decapitated nor cremated—they are collared and become zombie servants tasked with menial jobs. All of this is controlled by a company called ZomCon, which also maintains fences around town, keeping folks safe from the zombie-infested wild zones.

BTS, Eat Your Heart Out

Film: KPop Demon Hunters
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on Fire!

Based on the film’s almost immediate cultural impact, I suppose I wasn’t really surprised at the Oscar nomination for KPop Demon Hunters. When this hit NetFlix, it became a huge sensation. What better place to start going through Oscar movies than this, I thought. It’s not a movie I would normally choose to watch and I’ll knock it out quickly and move on. Honestly, my original plan was to watch One Battle After Another, but by the time I had a chance to sit down with a movie, it would have taken my past midnight to finish. And so, KPop Demon Hunters it is.

This is a film where I want to spend a lot of time on what it is and less on the plot, so I’m going to speedrun the story in three paragraphs. Years ago, demons plagued the Earth, collecting souls and feeding them to Gwi-Ma (Byung-hun Lee), the demon king. A trio of women rose up to stop the demons, and pushed them back both with fighting skill and with the power of song, which created a magical barrier called the Honmoon. As time progressed, new signing trios emerged to maintain the Honmoon and fight against the demons who managed to break through.

More Like a Bad Dream

Film: Sleepwalkers
Format: Streaming video from Tubi TV on Fire!

We have got to talk about Sleepwalkers. Once upon a time, Stephen King, who wrote this screenplay, had a serious drug problem. There’s evidence of that in some of his projects, like the ridiculous Maximum Overdrive (the only movie he directed), and this one. Sleepwalkers has a premise that is at least mildly interesting, if a bit derivative. But once you get past the premise, this movie is complete nonsense. What it has going for it is that it’s the ridiculous kind of nonsense that eventually gets beyond silly and kind of becomes entertaining again.

You should be aware right from the start that we are going to go in some nasty places here—not nasty in the sense of blood and gore, but nasty in the sense of the habits of our two main characters. We start with police in California investigating a house that is surrounded by the bodies of dead, often mutilated cats. There’s also the desiccated body of a young girl in the house as well, but no sign of the occupants.

Infect Me With Your Love

Film: 28 Years Later
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on various players.

28 Days Later is not just one of my favorite horror movies; it’s one of my favorite movies. I was wildly disappointed in the sequel, 28 Weeks Later. The first 10-15 minutes are brutal and fantastic, and then it becomes a series of plot holes. Danny Boyle and Alex Garland have returned to the series, though, and have inexplicably skipped having 28 Months Later, going instead for years. I was guardedly optimistic going into this one. I adore the first movie, but I’ve been burned by a sequel before.

The lore is something that definitely needs to be addressed here. The second movie ends with what seems to be the Rage virus being released on the European mainland, a fact that would quickly lead to the virus spreading across all of Europe, into the Middle East and Asia, and potentially into Africa as well. We get a snippet at the start of the virus spreading in the Scottish highlands, with a young boy named Jimmy Crystal (Rocco Haynes initially) escaping, and also watching his minister father willingly give himself over to the infected in what he believes to be something like the Rapture.