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Yeah, here we are again. Atlanta sports hurt me, you run to your pod-machine to listen to me be sad and laugh at my anguish. Well, after the last week, I did not disappoint. Sure, I talk about the Braves, the Falcons and the Dawgs all hurting me in their own unique ways (racism, general ineptitude, coaching) but I also get to ask about the role of sports in the opioid crisis and the NBA vs. China. REAL FUN EPISODE.

Guest: My pain

 

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Kriss is back with another episode of the Insanity Check to cover this week's dose of insanity in the world. This week he's joined once again by Justin from ThreeFifsPodcast.com. We open with the serious (but also not serious) threat from Ben Shapiro...a whiny, man baby who threatens violence because of the thought of his child being taught about LGBTQ issues. It's amazing how many people use religion to hide behind when it comes to their bigotry. Then we move on to Kanye, the Dallas PD being completely out of control and more. Give it a listen.

Topics:

* Ben Shapiro... studio gangster

* Kanye at Howard - We all know how this is going to end

* Amber Guyger's judge hugs her after sentencing and gives a really stupid reason why

* Black people being asked and conditioned to forgive is abuse

* Dallas PD shoot another black person in their own home

* Elizabeth Warren is trolling the trolls (Facebook)

* Great Moments in White Privilege

* Ellen and her best friend...GW Bush

Guest: Justin - @LJay90

 

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Brandon and Kriss review the new animated The Addams Family movie. This film has an incredibly stacked voice cast with names like Oscar Isaacs, Charlize Theron, Chloë Grace Moretz, Finn Wolfhard, Bette Midler, Jenifer Lewis and many many more. It's pretty much anyone you can think of. So what did Brandon think of the film? Listen to the review to find out

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If not for the horrible CG, lackluster fight scenes and unnecessary villain exposition Gemini Man would be a good film. That said, since most of the 117 minute runtime is filled with these aforementioned things, Gemini Man is anything but good. Now that should come as no surprised to anyone who actually watched the trailer. Outside of watching a younger Will Smith smack an older Will Smith in the face with a motorcycle, there is nothing really in the film that screamed “this is a must watch”. Let’s be honest with ourselves. Even in the trailer, the CG used to de-age Smith looked extremely suspect. 

 

The plot to Gemini Man is so simple you’d think this was a 1997 action film. That’s probably because it was first conceived in 1997 and has been struggling to be made for over 20 years. Put in that context, everything that’s wrong with Gemini Man falls into place. Will Smith plays Henry, an aging hitman who is “the best at what he does” (No Wolverine) and decides he wants to retire. But instead of just letting the guy who is extremely good at killing retire in peace, of course there’s some secret government plot that needs to “tie up loose ends” and of course Henry is one of those loose ends. To add to the clusterfuckery of the plot, Clay Verris (Clive Owens) is head of a government contract firm that trains mercenaries for the US Government. He also created Project Gemini which…well, you can figure out where it’s going from here. Again, this sounds like a plot of a late 90’s, early 2000’s throw-away action film mainly because it is.

 

Let’s stick with the good first since there’s not a lot. Mary Elizabeth Winstead plays Danny Zakarweski, an agent sent to keep an eye on Henry when he decides to retire. She ends up getting dragged into going on the run with him in the classic “now we’re both in this mess so we gotta stick together” trope. The positive here is that Danny isn’t just some wet-behind-the-ears agent and is actually pretty good at holding her own. For a film that feels like it’s straight out of the late 90’s, it’s appreciated that they didn’t duplicate the “helpless Damsel”. 

 

Gemini Man doesn’t go completely off the rails from the beginning. The film hovers in “enjoyable B-Movie” range up through the first confrontation between Henry and his clone that involves Will Smith’s face and a 5-tire slap with a motorcycle. The motorcycle chase scene is actually pretty intense. But it also gives hints that the rest of the film is quickly on its way to falling apart. You start to notice times when they couldn’t quite get the editing right and that the clone Will Smith is clearly a stunt double. Whenever Henry and “Junior” (they really couldn’t think of a better name for the clone) are on screen together, the CG de-aging process used just doesn’t hold up. There are scenes where Henry and Junior are walking next to each other and it looks as Junior is almost mechanical. With a $138 million budget, there is no excuse for how bad this film looks in scenes like that. Will Smith has an extremely animated face when he acts and it seems to have really caused some issues with the de-aging CG. The only time Junior is able to correctly emote is when those classic Will Smith tears start coming. Can’t clone those tears.

 

Even worse, the film ending is pretty anti-climatic. There’s a lot of villain exposition and “reveals” audiences will see coming a mile away and no real payoff. This is clearly a film that should have stayed on the pitch meeting floor (or trashcan). When a film takes 20 years to get made, then it probably wasn’t a good concept in the beginning. 

 

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Lucy in the Sky took skills to make. It’s not often that film gets to be three bad films in one. This a film that suffers much like its protagonist from not having a clarity in purpose and direction. The film doesn’t know if it wants to be the story of a female astronaut who loses touch with reality after being in outer space and seeing how small the world is or a film about how women go crazy over male genitalia. For those who may need the warning, this film ends up being more of the latter than the former. Apparently it’s based (loosely) on the story of Lisa Nowak. If that name doesn’t ring a bell maybe this will: Astronaut Diaper Lady. Yes, instead of being an interesting character study on how going to space and seeing the beauty of the world from such heights can have you more focused on getting back to that moment that one loses connections to their personal lives, Lucy in the Sky decided to throw that all away to become a film about a woman who becomes emotional and cracks. It’s offensive.

 

Natalie Portman and Jon Hamm in the film LUCY IN THE SKY. Photo by Hilary B. Gayle. © 2019 Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation All Rights Reserved

With Ad Astra still in theaters, it’s hard to not be offended by the script that three men (Noah Hawley, Elliot DiGuiseppi and Brian C Brown) settled on for this film. In Ad Astra, Brad Pitt’s character (much like Portman’s in Lucy in the Sky) is in epitome of calm, cool and collected under pressure. Even when he begins to crack and let more emotional responses slip out, he’s still professional in his job. Contrast that with Lucy in the Sky where Lucy Cola (Natalie Portman) starts off as this ace hotshot and then slowly spirals more into caring more about her affair with Mark Goodwin (Jon Hamm) than her job or being professional. The screenplay reeks of men not believing a woman being emotional means she’s about to crack. 

 

The back half of Lucy in the Sky is drastically different from the beginning. One could attribute that to Lucy going fully crazy but honestly, it’s because the script itself just became lazy. There are plot points and character development moments for supporting characters that are just dropped. There was a moment to connect the dots on Mark Goodwin also suffering from his own issues and contrasting the to Lucy. Showing that a man who display the same questionable behavior as a woman gets treated not only differently but almost rewarded for it would have at least made the end of this movie a bit more to stomach. 

 

Lucy in the Sky clearly suffers from over-correcting during rewrites. It feels as if there were three completely separate and distinct stories being told for the same character in a linear fashion with no logical transition between them. It's hard to believe the resulting film is one that anyone involved with making it is the one that they really wanted. And it definitely isn't the film that audiences are going to want to see.

 

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New Suit. New Villain. More importantly…NEW VOLUME OF THE BOOK OF RALPH. Yes folks, it must be that time. The Flash is back for season 6 with Into the Void. Now we’re not saying that if DC released a limited edition, leather-bound copy of The Book of Ralph Volume 2 as a collector’s edition that we’d forgo our bills and budget to immediately buy it. But hard decisions would have to be made.

 

Honestly though, it is good to be back with The Flash. Season 5 was a great season that brought the show back to its season 1 glory. We got great growth for all the characters and the writers no longer stretch out plot points that the audience can clearly see over several episodes. Flash season 6 picks that right up with us clearly seeing that Barry and Iris, despite what they say, are not handling Nora’s erasure well. Barry has buried himself in his work as the Flash and Iris is hoarding items from Nora and trying to bury her feelings with the idea that this is temporary and she’ll see Nora again. We appreciate this season not dragging out what we can clearly see through.

 

We’re also interested in what the show does with Dr. Ramsey Rosso aka Bloodwork. Like Godspeed, Bloodwork is a relatively new addition to the Flash world (debuting within the last couple of years) and to be honest, isn’t really an interesting villain. But considering what the show did with Cicada last year, we’re intrigued to see where they take Bloodwork this year.

 

And then there’s the elephant in the room: Crisis. Crisis on Infinite Earths is either going to be the most amazing and ambitious crossover the Arrowverse has ever done or a spectacular failure. There’s really no in-between. Personally, we’re excited for it and think it will be great but it is clearly going to be an ambitious task. That said, out of all the Arrowverse shows, The Flash is the one that seems to be the most prepared for it. Since season 1 when Thawne showed us that newspaper article, we’ve been preparing for this. We don’t know how it will unfold but it does feel like we’re about to get a culmination of 6 seasons of prep work.

 

Listen as we chat up the season 6 premiere of The Flash.

 

Kriss and Dpalm record the Mailbag at the end of every month. If you want to send in your own questions and thoughts, email us: [email protected]

 

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Weather changing means I'm getting sick, we're deep in football season, and there's no time like the present to catch up with one of our (least?) favorite guests. Cameron Hawkins from South Kongress and The Goosedown and PWTorch is back with us to talk about China vs the NBA, NCAA rules, Baker Mayfield, and the GOP Primary that is Cards/Braves. Plus, we talk about the newest wrestling wars, and our hopes for how it all pans out.

Guest: Cam - @CeeHawk

 

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Shanna and The Doctor are BACK! We're kicking off this season of Supergirl with a preview of all the news and teasers for the show including the epic crossover, Crisis on Infinite Earths. We also dish out some tidbits from Supergirl producers, Jessica Queller and Robert Rovan throughout the episode. Check out this episode and don't forget to leave comments. We'll be back next Monday to review the first two episodes of the season. 

 

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There are several things that Prey does well, unfortunately it's not enough to overlook a very predictable plot. Logan Miller plays Toby, a young man who is set on a “character building” trip after his father is murdered by carjackers. Left for 3 days alone on an “uninhabited” island, Toby meets Madeleine, a young girl who grew up on the island with her mother. Madeleine tells Toby that whatever he does, he must hide from her mother cause if her mother finds him, she will kill him. Something evil is on the island and whatever it is has taken Madeleine’s mother and so both Toby and Madeleine must find a way to escape the island.

 

So first off, leaving a clearly traumatized and unprepared kid on an “uninhabited” island is probably not a good character building exercise. Toby shows some early signs that he’s almost incapable on surviving on his own, so the idea that he is just dropped off an an island somewhere to survive for 3 days sounds a lot like child abandonment and abuse. It’s things like that that hurt Prey. Audiences will find themselves rolling their eyes and muttering “that wouldn’t happen” to themselves. Yet the biggest issue that plagues this film is that it’s entirely too predictable. Audiences have probably seen this type of movie before. For many, after the opening montage that silently explains what happened to Madeleine’s family on the island, the plot “twist” will be immediately known.

 

Now this isn’t to say that Prey doesn’t do somethings right.The use of darkness to raise the tension of certain scenes is done extremely well. Normally darkness is used to just cover up a lower budget, and while that might be true with Prey it also serves a purpose. There are also some really great transitions with Toby having constant flashbacks to his dad and the men who killed him. Those transitions are used to blend reality and what’s in Toby’s mind very well. Logan Miller and Kristine Forseth do admirable jobs for what they’re given but with an 85 minute runtime, the focus clearly wasn’t on fleshing out characters or plot.

 

Overall Prey feels a bit empty. There are some great, intense moments but after the credits roll, it’s easily forgettable. 

 

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Brandon and Ro agree that ultimately Joker, is 1) not a comic book movie, 2) not remotely fitting as an "origin story " for the Clown Prince of Crime and 3) utterly misses the mark as a serious character study of Arthur Fleck despite there being potential for one hell-of-a story. Kriss was, of course, smugly unsurprised. The crew sat down to have a spoiler-free, yet highly opinionated talk about this one.