Jacob Sahms

The ninth episode in the Fast & the Furious stream of action flicks takes our crew of car thieves-turned-government-heroes into space. Seriously. Your ability to appreciate the film depends on how you read that first sentence. It’s either a recognition that when you jump sharks, you keep looking for the next shark to jump, or you call it quits and go after a different target. (Word on the street is that Vin Diesel wants the next film to involve time travel. Is that Back to the Fast Future?)

Old problems and family issues rise up in F9, as Dom Torretto (Diesel) discovers that his estranged brother Jakob (John Cena) is mixed up with Cipher (Scarlett Johansson), who is back to cause trouble for our heroes. First, she crashes Mr. Nobody’s (Kurt Russell) plane, and then sends Jakob to recover some black ops tech that the team acquires. Han (Sung Kang) isn’t dead. Queenie Shaw (Helen Mirren) gets involved. And did I mention they go to space? To stop a massive satellite that Cipher’s sidekick (Thue Ersted Rasmussen) sends up to hack worldwide computer systems? The stakes have never been higher!

The film has its spectacular moments, with fistfights on tanks and crazy electromagnets, but it’s still the witty dialogue that really draws the audience in. The melodrama aspects are so soapy that they’re almost funny, whether they’re intended to be or not, but the action is top-notch stunt-oriented, to the point where it seems like Furious and Mission Impossible are trying to settle a neighborhood bet about who can outdo whom.

With the theatrical and extended cuts, Universal has released the Blu-ray that includes a gag reel, commentary from Justin Lin (director, co-writer, producer), a look at John Cena’s love for supercars, and featurettes like “Practically Fast,” “Shifting Priorities,” and “Justice for Han.” With the tongue-in-cheek and laugh outloud, it’s begging for Universal to take the meme and make it reality: “Fast 10: Your Seatbelts.” (Right before Doc shows up driving the DeLorean.)

C’mon, guys, it could totally work!

Mare of Easttown was an unexpected gem, first telecast on HBO Max and now available via DVD. Over seven episodes, Kate Winslet’s detective Mare Sheehan navigates the troubling world of her hometown, where she once starred on the basketball court for her high school, and now lives in a tenuous web of family and relationships. When a young girl is murdered, just a year after another teenager disappeared, Sheehan’s grief over the loss of her son and her alcoholic self-medication threaten to derail her career, and crush what remains of her life. With Julianne Nicholson, Jean Smart, Guy Pearce, and Evan Peters, Winslet turned in a performance that helped the show net sixteen Emmy nominations, and win four. Winslet provides terrific soul in revealing gradually all of the layers of humanity, motherhood, addict, and detective in a searing performance that makes for must-watch television. While lacking in special features, the DVD delivers the complete, gritty arc over seven episodes, for fans of True Detective and other “complete” mystery storylines.

In its final season, Scott Bakula’s SAC “King” Pride fights for sixteen episodes to clean up crime on NCIS: New Orleans, a NCIS-spinoff that ran for seven seasons on CBS. In a season that touched on the impact of COVID-19 and wrapped up the arc started in season one involving Callie Thorne’s criminal Sasha Broussard, fans are treated to a completion of the story begun when NCIS included a two-episode introduction during the eleventh season of the original in 2014. On the DVD, special features include “Season 7: Pride and Joy,” “The Best of Times,” and “Perfect Pair,” to accompany the action of Pride’s crew takes against those who threaten the peaceful, easy feeling of The Big Easy.

Just in time for the fifth season, Seal Team Season Four arrives on DVD with all of the David Boreanaz that audiences are hoping for. When Boreanaz left Bones to become the leader of the Bravo team, Jason Hayes, audiences tuned in to see what would happen, and the squad including Neil Brown Jr., A.J. Buckley, and Max Theriot have not disappointed. While previous seasons took a longer look at Brown’s Ray Perry, this one gives more insight into the lives of Spenser and Quinn when they’re not out on a mission. Audio commentary, deleted scenes, and a trio of special features (“Brothers in Arms,” “Meeting of the Minds,” and “If You Build It”) highlight the DVD, while Boreanaz writes an episode in addition to the one he directs.

Based on Anthony Burgess’ novel, Stanley Kubrick’s Clockwork Orange dives into a satirical (murderous) discourse on the nature of humanity and free will. Along the way, it’ll question where a person can be forced to be good or if goodness can only be determined by the actions a person makes on their own. It’s a troubling display, with a depth of potential if audiences are willing to wade into the grime covering leading man Malcolm McDowell’s Alex DeLarge.

Between Spartacus and Dr. Strangelove on one side, and The Shining and Full Metal Jacket on the other, Kubrick delivered this controversial piece of cinema in 1971. It’s a dystopian drama that’s as disturbing as Mad Max but that lacks the hope of The Book of Eli. (In fact, one of the author’s issues with the film is that the final chapter, one that established some hope of the future, was left out of American versions of the novel and Kubrick’s film.)

Now, on this ultra clear version of the film, McDowell and historian Nick Redman provide commentary, while special features like “Turning the Clockwork,” “Still Tickin,'” and others provide more insight into the making of the film and how it has been received over time. It’s considered a work of art for Kubrick’s eye behind the camera, but what are the actual lessons one can take away from this pessimistic look at the world and the way that humanity is headed?

It’s… hard to say.

From a Christian perspective, and Burgess considered himself a lapsed Catholic, it’s a film that seems to highlight how evil the inclinations of the human heart are. While DeLarge is put through conversion therapy later on in the film, it doesn’t actually cure him of his violent inclinations. He’s not a good person, but he seems to actually enjoy the evil he commits. No matter what he’s exposed to, he dives in deeper, drawing pleasure from the trouble he causes. Forcefully trying to break him of the violence (and alternatively using the violence), the government seems to be of two minds about the need for violence, making the conversion more about utilitarian means than actual social morality.

The overall vibe is creepy, and tragic. We vacillate between physically recoiling from DeLarge, and feeling sorry for him. He’s a warning about tomorrow’s youth, stuck between what could be and what is, what young people are told and what they’re pointed toward. This is especially true when we consider the way violence in wartime works, or the expectations on one level for law enforcement push into conflict, or on a smaller level the approach we have toward sports and competition. In the end, it’s not abundantly clear as we survey the violent world we live in that Burgess and Kubrick haven’t told a story that in its own way has come true.

Before he was helming The Godfather, Apocalypse Now, or The Outsiders, Francis Ford Coppola began his directing career with a Psycho knock-off commissioned by Roger Corman with funds left over from Corman’s The Young Racers. The end result is a black-and-white film that shows the worst in human behavior, and grounds the story in human greed.

The film ultimately helped Coppola move forward from his role as a sound technician for Corman, and the Blu-ray from Lionsgate allows the audience to hear from the director by way of introduction and audio commentary. Film fans, and fans of Coppola’s later work, will find some value in examining the film, but the convoluted scripting and subpar acting won’t cover up that the quality is clearly an early attempt at filmmaking by a director who was still figuring out his methods.

Luana Anders’ Louise Haloran is the character who drives the drama, straight into a horrific family situation full of deception and dastardly double-crossing. Haloran’s husband dies of a heart attack, and knowing that she’ll never inherit from her husband’s rich family, she fakes the family into believing that he’s still alive and away for work. She begins to wind her way into the family’s good graces, and plays on the matriarch’s (Eithne Dunn) grief over losing her only daughter in a drowning accident on the property. As Haloran moves her plans forward, a new violence enters the picture as a shadowy figure who begins a murdering spree.

Like an Alfred Hitchcock film, Dementia 13 keeps the audience guessing, but it never quite garners enough attention to captivate like the subjects it tries to emulate. In the end, it serves as a reminder that greed doesn’t pay, and that deception breeds more deception – until the end result is tragedy for everyone.

Whenever I’m asked what my favorite movies are, The Shawshank Redemption always appears in my top five. Rewatching the film again in beautifully clear 4K Ultra HD, it’s at the top of the list, a remarkable story (“Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption”) by Stephen King translated to the screen by the talented Frank Darabont (The Walking Dead, The Green Mile). The power of hope shines through in the tragic life of Andy Dufresne (Tim Robbins), alongside his new friend Red (Morgan Freeman), under the watchful eye of the Warden (Bob Gunton) and the brutal prison guard, Hadley (Clancy Brown). In a world without hope, what chance does a good soul like Andy have?

In 1947, Andy is sentenced to life in prison Portland, Maine’s Shawshank State Prison for the murder of his wife and her lover. Red, a “lifer,” is drawn to the aura and goodness of Andy, even as Andy attracts the negative attention of “the Sisters,” a group of abusive prisoners, and the corruption of the Warden and Hadley. Andy’s real-world experience as a banker is put to work by the Banker, running financial processes from the prison’s library for the Warden and his cronies, alongside the older inmate Brooks (James Whitmore). Andy uses his influence to improve the library, fighting for resources and amenities to make the grind more bearable to the other inmates. He’s slowly building up a cache of respect within the prison walls, and it puts him on a collision course with those who run the prison.

There are so many moments that scream for attention, no, that patiently build waiting for a deeper introspection, a moment of quiet contemplation. There’s the moment when Brooks leaves the prison, paroled, and the aftermath; there’s the demonstrative interjection of “The Marriage of Figaro” over the loudspeakers of the prison, much to the Warden’s anger; there’s the use of the poster of Raquel Welch, with the camera’s loving caress. And there’s the beautiful friendship played out by Freeman and Robbins, in one of Freeman’s greatest roles and certainly in Robbins’ finest.

Like the real-life stories of P.O.W.s or a parable about justice, power, and hope in the face of persecution, Shawshank stands nearly thirty years later as a testimony to storytelling and the power of film. Nominated for seven Academy Awards, it won none, but it’s Rotten Tomatoes score sits at 91%; the Writers Guild considers the screenplay the twenty-second best of all time, and the film was deemed culturally important by the U.S. Library of Congress. The film just … sticks… with you, drawing out a variety of emotions and responses.

With the 4K HD version, Warner Bros. has included commentary by Darabont, alongside documentaries “Hope Springs Eternal: A Look Back at The Shawshank Redemption” and “Shawshank: The Redeeming Feature.” There are storyboards and photo galleries as well. But the story remains the thing that draws us in, demanding we consider the battle between light and dark, goodness and evil, even if what we initially expect isn’t quite what we get, like a magician’s sleight of hand or an old-fashioned parable where the meaning is hidden just out of sight, behind the darkness of the prison’s shadows.

Because hope rises.

In Catch the Bullet, twenty-two-year-old, veteran actor Gattlin Griffith rides in on a horse – as the villain. Alongside stars like Tom Skerritt and Jay Pickett, Griffith and his younger brother Callder share the story of a U.S. Marshal Britt MacMasters (Pickett) who returns home to find his father (Skerritt) wounded and his young son kidnapped by the villainous Jed Blake. While westerns aren’t as prevalent as they once were, Gattlin shared about the joy of making the movie, and showing what he could do as an actor and a horseman.

“It was a really comfortable place for me, because I’ve grown up around horses and I’ve been riding since I could walk,” explained Griffith, whose father Tad has been in a stuntman on over one hundred films, and also directed live western shows in Fort Worth or Las Vegas. “So it was a lot of fun to have a project where my love of acting and my love of horses got to meet.”

“It’s dangerous having a stunt family and a big property! A lot of the stunts we weren’t supposed to do were performed out of sight of our mom and dad. But we have cows and we often would try to ride them when we were young, so you get your brother to put his hands down [like a ladder] and flip your other brother onto the cow. But it would only be a few seconds before our backs were on the ground.”

“We had ridden all the horses so it was time!”

Griffith says that most of his co-stars were older cowboys with decades of more experience than he did, so he took tips from them on what to do on set. But the lessons he learned from his parents involved a “submergence in the film business,” having watched his dad leave for months at a time and perform big stunts. At six or seven, he was already acting in films like Changeling, and he experienced life on set early on. And in terms of playing the villain…

“I was pretty competitive as a kid, so I was used to being the bad guy,” the actor shares, chuckling. “It was usually younger brothers against the older brother, and I didn’t take it easy on them.”

Growing out the beard for the film, Griffith realizes that the film allows him to show a different side of himself, than what people expected based on his child roles. Preparing to play the role of the outlaw, he says he analyzed and looked at what made Jed Blake the bad guy, a phrase he puts in air quotes, having totally accepted his character’s motivations. “His struggle is with the past, having regret, wanting vengeance for what happened before,” Griffith proposes. “He lacks the ability to overcome that and find peace in the here and now, that fuels his ambition to cause pain to others.”

So what has he taken away from the film? He’s still happy to be acting while atop a horse, but there are deeper lessons here, too.

“Westerns are great and we should make more of them,” Griffith says, “but we can’t hide from our past, and we should be honest with our families and not hide from them.”

Catch the Bullet is in theaters, On Demand, and digital on September 7, so tune in to see Griffith ride – and stay tuned to see what western he ends up starring in next.

Ji-Yoon (Sandra Oh) is the newly-minted chair of the English Department at Pembroke University, an institution of higher learning that has struggled financially and publicly with its appearance. She is subject to Dean Paul Larson (David Morse) and in love with fellow English teacher Bill Dobson (Jay Duplass), and trying to stay on step ahead of the ring of older men who have ruled the sage halls of the department for years. But it’s a struggle, and not just because she’s navigating single parenting of her adoptive daughter Ju Ju and trying to co-exist with her traditional father, too.

The Chair, written by Amanda Peet and Annie Julia Wyman and produced by the Game of Thrones creators, is HILARIOUS, and … heartbreaking. Ji-Yoon finds herself in undocumented territory, navigating her older female colleague, the wonderful Holland Taylor as Joan Hambling, as well as older male colleagues like Bob Balaban’s Elliott Rentz who doesn’t believe a woman (or a minority) can do the job a man can. The new chair is pushing for Yaz McKay’s (Nana Mensah) tenure, but the department doesn’t like her “style” of teaching, which can’t be separated from her person as a black woman. All of this is political, and takes away from Ji-Yoon’s desire to focus on helping teachers be real influences in their students’ lives.

As if the work life wouldn’t be enough, Ji-Yoon is trying to determine where she stands with Bill, who still grieves his wife and is floundering in terms of addiction, influence with young people, and, suddenly, a moment caught on social media that creates a firestorm on the campus. He’s her best friend but she’s now his boss, and she’s significantly more aware of optics and power than he has the capacity for in the midst of his mourning. Thankfully, he proves to be a good pseudo-co-parent for Ju Ju, who has struggles of her own as the daughter of an Asian woman who is really Hispanic by birth. Identity is so huge here – for Ji-Yoon as a woman, Asian, mother, professor, boss, subordinate, leader, thinker, creator. It’s so cleverly written that The Chair draws us in and challenges us to see even more of Ji-Yoon, and ourselves.

When the six episodes were over, I wanted more. It was so quick-witted, multi-layered, and tender, both in laughter in tears, that I wished that it had run a whole sitcom season. But Netflix served it up, and as a one-time English professor, I found myself grinning (and gritting my teeth) at the moments I lived through or watched my colleagues live through in the real world. It’s absolutely entertaining, but it also raises so many questions for the audience to consider, like:

-How do we determine a person’s value when their approach is different than ours, while also not letting their superficial differences create a barrier?

-How do we determine what is good and wholesome of our tradition to hold onto, and how do we figure out what to let go of?

-How do we take responsibility for our actions when we get things wrong, while also not accepting guilt shoveled onto us by others when it’s not our responsibility?

-How do we grieve, healthily, and create space for others to heal, too?

I can only hope there’s a second season of The Chair, but I imagine it will require new characters (like True Detective) and not spin forward like Game of Thrones.

Sweet Girl, a Netflix thriller, stars Jason Momoa as Ray Cooper, a veteran and father who watches as his wife passes away to cancer after a medical syndicate forces a drug off of the market, and feels compelled to wage a one-man war against the corporations involved. While primarily a “standard fare” kind of film that we’d expect to see Ryan Philippe or Bruce Willis in, the film’s script by Gregg Hurwitz and Philip Eisner attempts to give the Aquaman star a broader platform to work from with Sweet Girl.

Cooper’s daughter Rachel (Isabela Merced, Dora and the Lost City of Gold) serves as the heart of the film, as Cooper’s desire to fight the evil he sees in his wife’s death clouds him at times from seeing his remaining role as father. She is along for the ride in the first two-thirds of the film but ultimately gets her chance to shine in terms of action violence, too. While the Coopers are up against overwhelming numbers at the medical corporations’ disposal, their primary opponent appears as Manuel Garcia-Rulfo’s hitman Amo Santos. Santos humanizes the face of the medical decisions that are primarily economic not Hippocratic, alongside Justin Bartha’s CEO Simon Keeley who oozes sleaziness while also appearing publicly to not say anything wrong.

There’s a strange twist at the end of Sweet Girl that is aimed at clever, but comes across as passably unacceptable in terms of narration and storytelling. While we’ve read books and seen movies with unreliable narrators, this is something I’m still shaking my head about the hook they pull off. I understand the transition they were aiming for, but it didn’t work for me. (Somehow, the 19% Rotten Tomatoes rating makes me think I’m not the only one.)

While the film comes across as derivative, Momoa and Merced are solid in their roles and show more than they have in their previous roles. I’d love to see them team up again with something less ridiculous mixed in, but we’ll see if that happens. Momoa definitely has the capacity for more, and it remains to be seen whether he’ll get more roles that stretch him.