Monsters with and without bras.

Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves

Bottom line – I was shocked by how much fun I had watching Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves. I’ve never played the game, although I’ve been told I’d be a natural at it (now accepting invites to any and all existing campaigns), and the early trailers made the movie seem like formulaic crap – bland characters spouting quippy one-liners about how “awkward” things were or how bored they were while Led Zeppelin‘s Whole Lotta Love blasted in the background. However, I sat in that crummy AMC theater on Mill Avenue Friday night with one of my best friends in a relatively full theater and was absolutely delighted from beginning to end. For a 90-minute movie that’s a heck of an achievement, for a 134-minute movie that’s damn near impossible. Sure, Dungeons & Dragons doesn’t reinvent the wheel in any way, shape or form, but it does something hardly any big budget action extravaganzas do nowadays – keep things simple. It doesn’t let the attempt to set up a monster fucking franchise get in the way of firmly establishing its characters and their relationship dynamics and it doesn’t try to be this laughably self-serious and dramatically inept political allegory because it knows it doesn’t have the juice to do that. This is just a fun, dumb, raucous good time with likable performances and clever set pieces (like a morbidly obese dragon that was simultaneously the funniest and cutest thing I’ve seen all year.) The always underrated Chris Pine is a fantastic front man for this and Michelle Rodriguez more or less plays the “character” she always plays, which is actually the perfect casting choice for this. Hugh Grant is wonderful as the slimy villain, giving mad Paul Reiser-in-Aliens vibes, as are a very funny Justice Smith and Sophia Lillis as supporting hero characters that round out the core four. First, Scream 6 and Creed III, then John Wick 4 and now this? The blockbuster is fucking back, baby! Let’s all prepare for when they fuck up this streak with Super Mario Bros next week. Grade: B+ (In Theaters)

MILF Manor Season 1

An earwig has slithered into my brain and started eating it. It’s name is Milf Manor Season 1 and it’s the single most abhorrent and soul-crushing thing I’ve ever had to watch since that Tubi Original Movie about the Amber Heard/Johnny Depp trial. Lol, had to watch? I didn’t have to watch this. I made a conscious decision based on how much I apparently hate and wanted to see myself suffer. The plot for MILF Manor is that producers took a bunch of MILFs who like fucking barely legal dudes and promised them a tropical getaway in Mexico where they’d have their pick of the recently pubescent litter. The twist is these boys are actually the MILFs’ sons, ranging in age from 21 to 30. It would be one thing if this was an unethical, disturbing but wildly entertaining show, like entertaining in a way where you would tell nobody how much you like it while feeling utterly ashamed for watching it, and then be forced to seriously examine everything that brought you to this point in life. However, MILF Manor isn’t even the guiltiest of pleasures, it’s such a poorly produced catastrophe on so many levels that they barely had enough content to fill nine episodes.

Let’s break down the cast of MILFs and SILFs – leading the pack is 51-year-old Kelle, a loud MAGA idiot who yells at people for speaking Spanish (it’s rude in America – even though this was filmed literally in Mexico) who has leathery skin and squeals about needing dick all the time. Her son is 21-year-old Joey, a total goofus and spazz who is always doing weird things with this tongue and mouth. He’s pretty harmless and possibly the least hate-able SILF on the show. He sparks up a romance with April (60) the eldest but one of the most attractive people on the island. She’s nice but proves herself to be totally spineless, her son on the other hand is perhaps the most punchable SILF on the show – Gabriel.

Gabriel (20-something?) dresses like a rockstar but clearly doesn’t play an instrument, he’s an obnoxious poser who thinks he’s fucking Johnny Depp in Benny & Joon mixed with a neutered Gary Oldman in Sid & Nancy. You feel bad because it’s obvious he’s had some emotional abuse and neglect in his life, mostly from his Viper Room-reject asshole dad, but if you just happened to be at the same restaurant as him you’d probably be so annoyed that you’d depart mid-meal. He’s pursuing the least likable MILF of the bunch, Stefany, an egregious hypocrite who uses her faith in “Jesus Christ” to distract people from the fact she loves turning people against each other. “But how could I have known, I’m such a Christian!” Bullshit. Her son is the saddest of the bunch, Billy, who so obviously doesn’t want to be there. I’m also 74% sure he’s gay, but not at a point in his life where he thinks it’s safe to come out. Probably his mom and her dumb Christian bullshit. That made me sad. Anyway, he starts going on dates with the MAGA MILF, Kelle but gets nervous when she can’t stop talking about his big black dick and gets all forceful. She calls him names because he doesn’t want to fuck her on camera, and then shifts her attention to the most popular SILF on MILF Manor – Jose.

Jose is a nice guy – at least that’s what the edit suggests – and he seems like the only SILF who would know how to sexually satisfy a middle-aged woman who completely knows her body. He starts dating the MAGA MILF and it’s a match made in hell. Jose‘s mom, Paola, the single most attractive and popular MILF on the island, hates this arrangement because Kelle yelled at her for speaking Spanish in the previous episode…in Mexico. However, Paola shouldn’t be so quick to judge her son’s romantic endeavors cause she’s mixed up with one of the biggest asshole SILFs on the island, Ryan. Ryan is an aspiring songwriter the way I’m an aspiring lawyer – I can bullshit about it at parties when I’m loaded but there’s no inherent skill or talent there. He’s a total control freak, a trait he very obviously inherited from his mother, Shannan, an Atlanta-based event planner who would probably bully me IRL. Paola also is courted by the much more palatable Jimmy, one of the kindest SILFs on the show who weirds out the contestants by revealing he once got pinkeye from eating ass. Seems like something not too ridiculous given how inherently gross and morally bankrupt most of these people are. His mom on the other hand, Sooyoung, reveals she had sex with his best friend recently.

Rounding out the cast is the MILF nobody wants to procreate with, Charlene, the awkward, forceful and so obviously desperate New Jersey woman who will do anything to get a slice o’ himbo. Her son is a former exotic dancer and all around meat-head, Harrison, who clearly does not want to be there and certainly doesn’t want to have sex with a woman aged enough to be his birther. Also, we get another mother/son couple that are so boring they had to kick them out three or four episodes in and replace them with Lisa Wilcox, the actress who famously played Alice Johnson in Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master and Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child, and her son, also named Ryan. It’s very clear Lisa and Ryan 2 DO NOT want to be there as evidenced by their severe lack of participation and screen time. The son makes an effort to take Charlene on a date through a cactus garden which he prepares for by looking up cactus facts on Wikipedia for 20 minutes and robotically droning on about them as if that’s going to spark the flame for Charlene. Maybe he self-sabotaged so he wouldn’t have to hook up with a very desperate middle-aged woman trying to prove to herself she’s still viable sexual being. I love Lisa Wilcox, I’m a huge Freddy nerd and honestly, she was the main reason I got Discovery+ to watch this crap. She deserves better than this.

MILF Manor ends on a dumb note with the most annoying couple and two of the poorest matched couples going on to supposedly “try to make it work.” All of this feels so staged and fake but still, this is pretty gross. I doubt there will be a Season 2 as this was ultimately 70% boring and 30% disgusting. I wonder if I’d participate in this show with my mom? I don’t think I’m hot enough Grade: F (Discovery+)

Swarm

The new Donald Glover-produced/co-created limited series, Swarm, surrounds a culture of toxic fandom perpetuated by mentally unstable and often violent Twitter trolls. More specifically it follows a weird loner girl named Dre (a phenomenal Dominique Fishback) and her obsession with Beyonce stand-in, the fictional ‘Ni’Jah.’ If anyone disses her queen they got to go, and not just like ‘go’ — she straight up murders them. The show, co-created by Houston playwright and television writer Janine Nabers, doesn’t pull its punches on its bleak characterizations of these people and can often be so intense it’s difficult to watch, but it’s worth watching because it’s art of such a high-level…up to a certain point. Swarm is one of the most frustrating shows in recent memory because for five of its seven episodes it’s the best show of the year – poignant, unpredictable, beautifully suspenseful and featuring at its center, an amazing, once-a-career type of performance by Dominique Fishback (Judas and the Black Messiah, HBO’s The Deuce). Then, in the series’ penultimate episode, the ripcord is pulled and the show takes a tonal leap of faith that makes absolutely no sense and single-handedly destroys all the good creative choices that proceeded it. I don’t want to reveal how the show jumps the shark cause I’m not that kind of asshole, but it’s jarring and confounding to think that anyone, let alone Donald Glover, one of the single most talented motherfuckers in the entertainment industry, could ever think this was a good idea. The finale is somewhat better but it’s too late, the damage is already done and I simply didn’t care. It’s a shame because Swarm ultimately lets down Fishback, who never once wavers in her haunting and beautifully nuanced performance as a throbbing wound of a person. I wanted nothing more than to give this show an ‘A’, but it’s far more important how you finish than how you begin so at the risk of Dre hunting me down and bashing my skull in with a toilet tank lid, I’m giving it a B– (Amazon Prime)

South Park Season 26

It’s amazing to think that South Park has been running just a hair over a quarter of a century. With their somewhat recent residency at HBOMax as well as their controversial dealings with Paramount+ to make Covid-related long form specials (they were even involved in a lawsuit over this), they only had time to make six episodes this season, which varied in quality from good to very good. Having not a single dud in the season is not too shabby, even if none of the six episodes are comparable with the long-running series’ first tier or even second tier quality episodes. We open with a bizarre and entertaining commentary on Ye/Kanye West and his dumb Anti-Semetic bullshit, an episode that would have been better if his whole Jonah Hill in 21 Jump Street revelation had happened before the episode aired. After that there’s a solid but not as funny take on Prince Harry/Meghan Markle and a very funny and bizarre take on Japanese bidet toilets, which stands as the season’s highlight. Close in quality this episode is a fantastic take on ChatGTP before transitioning into the weakest episode of the season about restaurant renovations that so obviously comes from Trey Parker and Matt Stone‘s own struggles with the real-life Casa Bonita. Finally, we have a mid-range season closer which features Mr. Garrison and Rick spring breaking in South Carolina where Garrison is drawn into MAGA rallying (and his former life) the way that an older gay man might be drawn into the wild partying and popper-aided sex parties of his youth. Season 26 is not South Park at its finest but it does prove the show still has some life left in it. Grade: B (HBOMax)