The good, the bad, and the merely ok.

Reservation Dogs Season 3

One of the best and most underrated shows on television just came to a close on Hulu/FX. Yes, even better than The Bear, that delightful tragicomedy about brooding chefs sulking over stockpots. Reservation Dogs follows the lives of members of an Oklahoma Native American reservation community, primarily four teenage friends on the brink of adulthood – Bear (D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai), Elora (K. Devery Jacobs), Cheese (Lane Factor), and Willie Jack (Paulina Alexis), and how circumstances and time strengthen and change their friendship. Taking a page out of Donald Glover‘s Atlanta playbook, which took a page out of Louis CK‘s Louie handbook, not every episode follows the core members of the cast but serves to build the community and world in which the show is set. This means that episodes can shift genres – examples this season would be one that centers around a Deer Lady urban legend that takes on the tone of a brutal revenge thriller, or a 70s flashback episode that feels like Dazed & Confused meets Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Of course, there’s also much needed episodes that function primarily as coming of age comedy, the usual tone of the show, exploring the adventures of our core fore teens and the bonds of their friendship expanding or deteriorating based on how they evolve as people. Some want to leave the Rez for bigger dreams, while others feel a responsibility to stay and preserve the community. The smartest thing this show does other than give us wholly developed people even in its secondary characters, is never give us the answers. We don’t know if the kids should stay or go, there is merit to both choices. Like a lot of half-hour “comedies” on television, Reservation Dogs delivered heavy laughs but it also delivered a complex, lived-in world we hardly ever get to see in the medium. It will be missed. Grade: A (Hulu)

Only Murders in the Building Season 3

The delightful crowd-pleaser Only Murders in the Building returned for a star-studded (Meryl Streep, Paul Rudd, Matthew Broderick?!?!) third season but collapsed under the weight of its own ambitions. This show is best when it centers around its three protagonists (Steve Martin, Selena Gomez, the incomparable Martin Short) working together to solve a crime. This season gets sidetracked with an enjoyable but far from great romance subplot, a tired show-within-a-show trope, and way too many supporting characters, some of the most significant of whom seem to pop up from nowhere while others just disappear into the background. The killer reveal is both predictable and underwhelming, and as good as Meryl Streep is as the season’s main guest star, a struggling actress who never got her break (give me a break) who is also a prime suspect, the place her story eventually arrives at is a place we’ve been many times before, often more riveting. I get this show has to offer something more than just a new mystery every season to not get tired and old, but maybe this is one of those shows that can just exist three or four seasons and be over. Maybe this show didn’t even need a second season. It seems like with Only Murders int he Building we’re dealing with diminished returns every year. The show isn’t bad but by next year, it might be. On the bright side, Oliver will never not be hilarious. Grade: C+ (Hulu)

Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey

The views expressed in this review are merely opinion, my opinion which is not definitively correct.

I’d respect the filmmakers more if they simply robbed me outside the theater instead of making me sit through this 84-minute lifeless turd. This is an excerpt from my unpublished review of Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey from when I saw it in theaters as an overpriced Fathom event earlier this year….

Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey is worse than a terrible movie, at $18 a ticket (more like $21 after all of AMC’s wildly creative “service” fees) and with unfinished special effects – the opening “kill” literally cuts to hand-drawn storyboards thrown up on-screen to represent what happens – it’s a straight-up scam. It’s clear from the first frame the filmmakers here aren’t interested in making anything good as much as they are making something fast, being the first ones out the gate with a splatter movie take on the beloved and now free domain children’s characters, quality be damned. I’m not going to mention the filmmakers by name as to not award him any more exposure, I’d rather discuss people who love making movies and not some opportunistic asshole looking for a quick buck. Also, leave it to Fathom Events to adopt this nothing movie, a joint venture owned by AMC, Cinemark, and Regal that bring “events” like the Metropolitan Opera and mediocre stand-up specials to movie theaters. The reason being is so that Joe Schmoe of Nashville, Ohio can take the wife to see The Magic Flute and also get a one-pound tray of nachos with extra dumb ass sauce while he’s there. Anyway, I’m getting off track. The journey to see this sloppy pooh pile was a pain in the furry ass, but it’s wasn’t nearly as bad as having to watch the “film” itself which is depressing enough as a standalone movie but downright egregious as the first entry in a proposed film franchise. Mamma Mia! Let’s unpack this…

The story is super confusing, at least to me, who came in two minutes after the movie had started because, unbeknownst to me, AMC doesn’t show their standard 30-minute block of movie trailers before a Fathom Event. Even though the AMC website clearly states to allow for at least 20 minutes of previews (and the site added 20 minutes to the listed runtime), whatever. So, I guess my buddy and I missed a couple of frames of this movie because we walked in during a close-up of a crudely drawn 100-acre wood sign. From there, we meet Christopher Robin, back from college with his fiancé or wife or FWB in tow, who he can’t wait to introduce to his woodland critter friends who live there. However, Pooh and Piglet aren’t like he remembers at all. They’ve since become vicious killers living like Hills Have Eyes people. The filmmakers couldn’t get the rights to Tigger, so he’s notably absent. Eeyore is apparently dead in this timeline, as indicated by a cardboard headstone written in smeared blood. For some reason, Christopher Robin doesn’t see that as a reason to get the hell out of dodge, so he and his lady friend head deeper into this creepy ass backwoods dungeon where they are brutally attacked by Pooh and Piglet, two heavyset stuntmen wearing Spirit Halloween masks and exhibiting absolutely zero animal characteristics. Piglet doesn’t even look like Piglet; the actor is wearing a Javelina mask or something. Besides being a tad shorter than the big ass motherfucker they got to play Pooh, nothing about him is small. He’s called Piglet cause he’s little; why not just call him Pig? Could they not hire a little person actor? What assholes.

That opening and pretty much every other kill scene is so poorly lit and shot that you can barely make out what is happening. The chase scenes, in particular, take shaky cam to nauseating levels, ultimately doing nothing to aid in creating a mood for the movie. It’s difficult to tell what the director was going for; the film seems lost in the middle of a painfully unfunny, lowest-brow imaginable horror comedy and flagrantly sadistic torture porn. What am I saying? The director wasn’t trying to strike any specific mood other than “fast and cheap.” It’s as if they were like, “what if we made Pooh and Piglet the exact opposite of what they are?” and then decided to just call it a day. There are also so many things about these killers that never get explained, like a random trail of bees that follow Pooh around and murder people for him. I guess it’s because Pooh is naturally attracting them with the exorbitant amount of honey he always has on his person, which they make drip from his Halloween mask like he’s a xenomorph or some shit. They choppily explain that Pooh and Piglet are mutants; I think the unfortunate consequences of a human mating with a bear/pig/whatever. Wonderful. Much less confusing than these manbearpig killers are the undeveloped gaggle of gals they stalk.

When we meet the obligatory slaughter fodder for the rest of the movie, they’re totally one-dimensional characters played by fairly decent actresses. The most pleasantly surprising element of the movie is how not awful any of them are. That being said, none are particularly memorable and we limp to a dumb ending that sets up countless sequels. Fingers crossed we never have to endure them. Look, nobody thought this was going to be good but it could have at least been fun and so bad it’s good. The laziness on display here from a filmmaking perspective gives the viewer a bitter aftertaste. Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey is worse than garbage, it’s nauseating to endure. Grade: F (Peacock)