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michiganmand
Reviews
Diani & Devine Meet the Apocalypse (2016)
Deserves Better Exposure
I streamed Diani & Devine Meet the Apocalypse after enjoying Gabriel Diani and Etta Devine's first movie, the horror-comedy The Selling which I checked out from the local library. Diani & Devine Meet the Apocalypse delighted audiences at small indie movie festivals and it's easy to see why. It's one of those comical oddity gems, the type that you sometimes find distributed by Fox Searchlight pictures. Too bad this movie hasn't had the same kind of exposure. It begins by roasting the Hollywood star-making machine (maybe why it hasn't been distributed more widely) before it parodies those us-against-them apocalyptic survival flicks. It's all done with a clever script, fine acting and sharp editing. You'll want to watch it more than once to make sure you catch all the jokes.
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (2023)
Great animation, muddled contrived story
I took my grandboys to see this at their request. It's a very long movie with many plot twists but without a satisfactory ending. The dialogue is rapid-paced and often gets lost in the amplified music and sound effects. It's one of those movies where you say, "What was that all about?" once it's over. Perhaps fanboys who love Spiderman will get it. I didn't and neither did my grandkids, one of them saying, "Are you kidding?" when the end titles came on. The animation kept the action briskly moving with its dips, swoops and dives. The dialogue was witty in spots as well. But as other critics have said, much could have been cut out of the movie and it would have been fine, perhaps even better.
Not Going Quietly (2021)
Sad Tale Laced With Irony
It's ironic that protagonist Ady Barkan's battle to open the floodgates of expensive, high quality health care to everyone largely ignores that he does benefit greatly himself from our healthcare system as it is. The movie avoids the elephant in the room--who is paying for his speech synthesizer, high tech wheelchair and customized motor home? What liberals seem to miss is that this costly care has to be paid for by someone; they just want some other group of taxpayers to foot the bill. The movie also ignores the question of who is paying for these political activists like Barkan to traverse the country harassing politicians and their staffs while most Americans are just trying to make a living themselves which includes paying for much of their own healthcare through increasing premiums, co-pays and deductibles. .
The movie is sad in how it documents the decline of a vibrant family man and how all the billions of dollars spent on neuro-muscular disease research has not produced any promising treatments leading to a cure or at least a better result than suffered by Barkan and, more quietly, thousands of others similarly afflicted.
Feast (2005)
Gross, Stupid, But Fun
Feast, the last of three Project Greenlight series which provided a movie-making opportunity for wannabe film directors and writers, suffers from the same shaky cinematography and plot holes that plagued the first two projects. Yet this dark horror comedy brings enough clever dialog and over-the-top action to redeem it as a Halloween rental. A barful of losers band together to fight off attacks from a family of biped monsters, hungry for human flesh. The idea behind the film is that more is better--more characters, more confusion, more gross-out moments, and more action. More is not always better which is why this film has sat on a shelf for going on two years. But if you ignore the films' weaknesses and focus on the action, it's fun.