Movie Review: The Bikeriders


The new movie “The Bikeriders” will surprise many fans who will expect a standard movie drama about men in the late 1960’s and 70s who chose a life of crime, riding bikes, drinking, and drugs, during the era of the Vietnam War. Instead, this movie tries to tell the story like it’s an interview/documentary with the main interviewee, Kathy, played by Jodie Comer, talking to a reporter about her life as the wife of a motorcycle gang member, Benny, played by Austin Butler. This entire story is told from Benny’s perspective and his life of meeting and then marrying his wife.

The problem with this unusual method of screenwriting telling is that the story becomes less chronological and more a series of vignettes, that can get old rather quickly. The idea of this kind of life is always the same, “when you live a life of violence, your time is always coming”. What goes around comes around with people like this, who spend their entire lives looking over their shoulder, or getting arrested by the police.

This movie stars a number of well-known famous actors, including Norman Reedus, Michael Shannon,
Tom Hardy and Damon Herriman. The acting is overall very good, with a story that meanders to different times with some flashbacks and at times moves too slowly. Unfortunately, other than telling the story like an interview/documentary there is nothing new here, nothing that all moviegoers have seen before.

The Rotten Tomatoes ratings for this movie are an average 82% with my rating 70% and a very marginal recommendation, only for some of the acting.

Movie Review: Tuesday


The new movie “Tuesday” starring Julia Louis-Dreyfus, is another one of those insane art movies, where “let’s do something never done before”, “strange or insane doesn’t matter, as long as this is something new”. Once again, like way too many movies like this one, weird and off-the-wall movie making, never means good or great movie-making.

My guess is the director/screenwriter Daina Oniunas-Pusic started writing a screenplay about a mother dealing with the grief of coming to terms with her terminally ill daughter. Then Daina soon realized that another tear-jerker film about a young woman dying had been done many times before. To be unforgettably different, rather than coming up with a great new idea, Daina adds a giant parrot to the story, whose job it is to end the lives of people who are close to death.

This giant parrot can speak fluent English, can grow small, large, or huge within any number of situations. For an idea this ridiculous within a movie that is supposed to be about a mother dealing with the death of her child, I was surprised at how much screen time was given to a rogue-talking ugly parrot.

Later in this story, through another crazy series of events, Zora, played by Dreyfus, takes over the duties of sending people to death and also can become very large or very small. Zora’s daughter, Tuesday, played by Lola Petticrewy, has a depressing combo role of slowly dying from an unidentified disease and having heart-to-heart conversations with a giant bird. For anyone with screenwriting ambitions, far too often it is hard to understand an industry that makes dumb crazy movies like this, when so many great screenplays will never be made into a movie.

The best review I have seen so far about this disaster of stupidity is from Al Alexander’s column on Movies Thru the Spectrum: “After wasting a Wednesday on “Tuesday,” I feel it my duty to warn you not to do the same – on any day of the week. Oy vey, what a hot mess!”

The only thing I got out of this insane waste of 2 hours is trying to understand how or why an actress as well-known and wealthy as Dreyfus would agree to make this horrific film in the first place. Especially since the giant parrot shows up on page 1 of the screenplay. Anyone else reading this idiotic screenplay would have mailed it to the Nature Channel.

The Rotten Tomatoes ratings for this stupid and insane movie are an equally insane 82%, with my rating at 10% – only for the talking bird. Miss this horrendous waste of time.

Movie Review: The Watchers


Ishana Shyamalan is the writer and director of the new movie “The Watchers”. She is the daughter of the famous director M Night Shyamalan who created the masterpiece “The Sixth Sense”, released in 1999, and the very good “Unbreakable”, released in 2000.

Unfortunately for M Night Shyamalan, his huge success 25 years ago, has not resulted in any movies since that time that are nearly as great as his early films as both the writer and director. Anyone must admire the body of work that M Night Shyamalan has completed in his movie career, including the hours writing and then re-writing scripts and even risking his own money on several of these projects. There is no better example of how difficult it is to write, produce and direct a great movie, than following the ups and downs of Shyamalan’s career.

As far as the new movie The Watchers co-written and directed by Ishana Shyamalan, the very low 32% ratings on Rotten Tomatoes are very well deserved. This is not a good movie in any way. From the bad story to the boring scenes to the acting, it’s amazing that a story idea this bad was ever greenlighted. “There are alien creatures who live in a forest who are watching people inside of a room that is a glass booth”. Who cares? There is very little showing of the alien creatures, or fully explaining their motivations. There are some side stories within this film that are not interesting enough to care about. Considering this is the first movie directing for Ishana, making this poor screenplay as her first film was the wrong move.

This movie stars Dakota Fanning as Mina in the main role and she seems to sleep walk through her entire part. There are some other actors within this movie, as some of other people who are being spied on by aliens. Again, who cares.

My rating for The Watchers is a low 20% and a solid pass.