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Movie Review: One Night Only

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In an attempt to be new and different, the screenwriter for “One Night Only” (Travis Braun) decided to turn the idea for the horror/crime franchise “The Purge” (5 movies) into of all things – a Romantic Comedy, with this ridiculous logline: “On the one night each year when single Americans can legally have sex, a recently dumped man and a hopeless romantic woman search for love amid the chaos of New York City — discovering that the one thing they really want may be something neither of them is allowed to have.” From the beginning this idea about “one night a year, where people can legally have sex”, never worked, was never interesting or funny and was just a bad idea that never should have been greenlighted. This idea may have worked for the violent Purge movies, given the five films produced, but it will die on the vine after this attempt at a Romantic Comedy based on a bad premise.

One Night Only stars Monica Barbaro (Allie), who works as a singer for bad commercials, and Callum Turner (Owen), who owns a small pizza parlor in New York City. Both Allie and Owen are having major relationship problems, including during this one insane night where everybody tries to have legal sex within a 24-hour window of time. This story is all about mishaps with both Owen and Allie trying to find the right person in bars and clubs in New York and Brooklyn, with several scenes that anyone watching this ridiculous movie would realize “no sane person would ever do this”.

Owen lives with his mother, Linda, played by Molly Ringwald, who is living with her boyfriend, Turner, played by LeVar Burton. This will make anyone seeing this movie think, “Why did LeVar Burton and Molly Ringwald agree to act in this film?” Is it this difficult to find a good part in a new Hollywood movie? It must be, to convince bankable stars like Monica Barbaro and Callum Turner to act in this bad idea for a Romantic Comedy.

What could have rescued this bad idea might have been a well-written smart comedy to offset this dumb premise. Unfortunately, there is not nearly enough comedy to bring this movie over a 50% rating.

The Rotten Tomatoes consensus of 49% is mostly correct, with my rating at 30% and a prediction that this one will be out of theaters in about two weeks.

Movie Review: I Want Your Sex

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The new movie “I Want Your Sex” was another example where I was tricked into seeing a bad movie for this blog due to the high reviews on Rotten Tomatoes. I am at a loss as to how a movie this bad could be getting any good critical reviews. I also wondered if this film had anything to do with George Michael’s 1987 hit song – which it did not.

“A young man lands a job working for a controversial artist, only to become an unwilling participant in a dangerous game where he is her employee and at the same time being coerced into being her unwilling sexual experiment”. This movie is supposed to be some kind of dramatic comedy, but there is nothing funny here.

The owner of an art studio Erika Tracey(Olivia Wilde), creates insane sexual art, including one involving a drawing of a female private part, where both customers and employees stick gum on the drawing, the hardest-to-believe exhibit in this movie. Erika hires Elliot Bell (Cooper Hoffman) as one of her employees, and almost immediately this relationship degrades into coerced sexual experimentation that Erika forces on her financially challenged victim. There are meaningless side stories that include Elliot and his very angry girlfriend, Minerva (Charli XCX), and Elliot’s other female (and equally broke) friend, Apple (Chase Sui Wonders), with several inserted police interview scenes with Detective Zem (Johnny Knoxville) and Detective Zola (Margaret Cho) – primarily to make this 30-minute nightmare film into close to two hours.

This is the kind of film that only shows up in older arthouse theaters, is very low budget, and will be out of movie theaters in about two weeks.

My rating for this disaster is 0%, and a recommendation to shred the DVD as soon as it is released.

Movie Review: Spider-Man: Brand New Day

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The last Spider-Man movie, “Movie Review: Spider-Man: No Way Home”, was released in December 2021, nearly five years ago. That movie had a plotline that continues into this latest franchise film, where Spider-Man’s two friends, MJ (Zendaya) and Ned Leeds (Jacob Batalon), do not remember who Spider-Man/Peter Parker (Tom Holland) is because, in the last film, the world discovered Spider-Man’s true identity. Peter Parker’s exposed identity caused many serious problems for his friends, forcing him to go to Doctor Strange to reverse time so that Parker could choose certain people in the world who were allowed to know Spider-Man’s true identity. Once again, for Marvel films like this, you have to suspend any level of common sense, and I considered this part of the story one of the most insane ideas within the Marvel franchise.

For this new film, Spider-Man has a new friend, Frank Castle/The Punisher (Jon Bernthal), and Detective Jean DeWolff (Liza Colón-Zayas) – who is one of the lead actors in “The Bear” Hulu series, and visits with his old friend The Hulk(Mark Ruffalo). Florence Pugh also makes an appearance as Yelena Belova/Black Widow, who has all of her scenes in a steam room, which I thought was too off-the-wall an idea.

Spider-Man is also very depressed, having lost his friends, and this time around, fighting nonstop crime is interrupted by some medical issues, with severe headaches that are suggested to be caused by his depression over losing his friends, including the love of his life MJ. He has many other medical issues, including his wrists’ spider web ejector either erratically working or not working at all.

The antagonist in this story is a woman named Jean Gray, played by Sadie Sink, who has the ability to invade people’s minds and force them to do whatever she wants, with the one exception being Spider-Man. Later in this story, Gray’s brain control ability increases greatly to being able to control the minds of everybody in New York City. All this creates many scenes of impressive special effects that are as good as, or in some scenes better than, all the previous Spider-Man movies.

I mostly agree with Rotten Tomatoes’ 91% rating, with my rating at 85% and a solid recommendation.