The logline for “Zombieland”, released in 2009 and the sequel, “Zombieland: Double Tap” are about the same. “A story about some friends after a zombie Apocalypse, who try to survive by running from and killing zombies, with some humor, camp and sarcasm mixed in”. The problem with both of these movies is, we have all seen many zombies being killed and zombies eating people and the humor is not strong enough to rescue either one of these movies.

This sequel to Zombieland, released 10 years after the original, is about the same as the original and I was surprised that they made a sequel but did not add anything new or special to this version. This movie stars all of the original cast members, Jesse Eisenberg. Woody Harrelson, Emma Stone,
Abigail Breslin and Bill Murray – who makes an appearance at the end of this movie.

The end of this film has one of the new trends in the industry where the audience thinks the movie is over, but its not, with this one having an unnecessary scene involving Bill Murray, who was killed in the first film. Once a movie is over, the audience wants to stand up and go home, but far too often, we have to stand up, wanting to leave, but we are forced to see one last scene that most of the time should never have been added. I hope this practice ends, because it does nothing more than annoy the audience. With some other movies, some last teaser scenes are shown long after the ending credits start, a good example being the recent “Hobbs And Shaw”, released this summer. I happened to see several of the “end of film teasers” for this movie by accident, while waiting for the start of another film. Why is this done? I have no idea.

Like with the last Zombieland this one fails with its most important ingredient, its just not funny enough. I agree with the anemic ratings on Rotten Tomatoes of 67% and I do not recommend this film.

The new documentary, “Where’s My Roy Cohn” is about the late Roy Cohn, arguably the most criminal and corrupt lawyer in the history of the United States. Despite his years of lying, stealing and destroying other people (including the Joseph McCarthy hearings in the 1950’s), he had many celebrity friends, including even Barbara Walters, Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump. All of them turned their back on him, after he was disbarred after years of corruption in the legal profession. Cohn was disbarred in part, for getting a wealthy dying man on his death bed, to sign over his property so Cohn could steal his money as his executor. It later turned out that the man’s signature was not only invalid, but nothing but a series of illegible lines.

Roy Cohn was a genius, with a photographic memory and an extremely high IQ. Despite this, he turned his powerful mind into wrecking the lives of other people rather than helping others. This documentary, like the recent movie “Joker” does a very good job not only showing the bad things Roy Cohn did in his life, but also why he became the hateful and despicable person he was. People become who they are for reasons, and it is never enough just to show the end result of anything. Cohn even became the lawyer to the Mafia, including even John Gotti, one time getting him a reduced sentence of 2 years for murdering someone in broad daylight in front of many witnesses.

The story about Roy’s mother was that she was so unattractive that her family had to promise a Judgeship to a local lawyer so he would marry her. Roy was an only child, who was spoiled and doted on by his mother, turning him into a selfish and mean child, who was smart enough to graduate from Columbia Law school when he was only 20 years old. Roy was very short and ugly man who was gay, but considering the time he lived could never admit he was gay. In fact, Cohn never admitted he was gay even days before he died of AIDS at age 59 in 1986. Roy’s vicious and attacking legal style attracted the likes of Donald Trump who considered Cohn his mentor, adopting many of his tactics to win legal judgement’s including getting away with not paying hundreds of Polish Immigrants who helped to build the Trump Tower in New York City in 1983.

While watching this documentary, it became easier to understand Cohn’s angry and vicious personality. Many of us have encountered in our personal lives or at work, people like Roy Cohn. People who are bitter about the way they look, and in the case of Cohn, having to hide being gay to save his career. People like Roy Cohn turn their anger outward and derive pleasure from damaging other people and for a time, make themselves feel temporarily better about their own miserable reality.

I agree with the very high rating for this documentary of 85% on Rotten Tomatoes and highly recommend this film.

“Gemini Man” is yet another sad example of special effects over a great screenplay. The special effects for Gemini Man are almost entirely about a new technology called “Face swapping AI”, where any person’s face can be superimposed on top of someone else’s image. This technology will also be used for the new Martin Scorsese film “The Irishman” that will be released on November 27th.

For this film, Will Smith is fighting a clone of himself, some 25-30 years younger and for most of this movie, the young Will Smith looks very realistic. Unfortunately, this amazing new effect is almost completely ruined at the very end of the film, when one of the last scenes has the young Will Smith looking very fake. For me, it was hard to believe that the quality of this technology did not follow through all the way to the end of the movie – how could this have been missed?

The problem with this story, accounting for the very low ratings of 26% on Rotten Tomatoes, is that its all about Henry Brogan, played by Will Smith, who is an assassin hired by the CIA and Danny Zakarweski played by Mary Elizabeth Winsted being chased from one part of the world to another for reasons that either made no sense or are too boring to even care about. There is not enough story here and considering the great director Ang Lee – it is hard to believe he read this script and thought it was good enough to make into a movie. It is almost as if Lee thought that the new special effects of using face replacement was enough to make up for a bad screenplay. It was not.

I am sure that Will Smith was hoping for a great movie comeback, but unfortunately this was not the one that is going to return him to the top of the box office. There was nobody in the theater I was in and with the low ratings on Rotten Tomatoes, this film will probably be out of most theaters by next week. There will never be a substitute for a great story idea, followed by months of hard work creating an equally great screenplay; one of the most difficult of all art forms. I agree with the low ratings on Rotten Tomatoes and do not recommend this movie.