BEFORE: Carrie-Anne Moss carries over from "The Matrix Resurrections", and not to give anything away, but here are the actor links which will get me to Thanksgiving: Viola Davis, Rob Morgan, Da'Vine Joy Randolph, Edi Patterson, Kevin Kline, Sarah Silverman, Cate Blanchett, Beau Bridges, and Ryan Hansen. Go nuts trying to figure out my line-up, I'll only say that there are two MUST-SEE movies for me in the mix, one of which is "The Bob's Burgers Movie". The rest is a mix of newish films on the Netflix and the Hulu, two films connected to Turkey Day, and two films that have been bouncing around on my list for a while, and one of those is today's film.
A very bad linking crime, worse than not leaving a spot for "Black Panther: Wakanda Forever", is not leaving a spot for "Weird: The Al Yankovic Story", which premieres today on the Roku Channel. What the hell is Roku, and how do I watch it? I thought Roku was like the Firestick, I thought it was some kind of device that you attach to your TV to get more channels, or do I not understand either the Firestick or Roku? It doesn't really matter right now, because even if I understood what or where Roku is, I don't have a slot for "Weird", but that's a damn shame. My number one Priority for January is to watch this movie somehow.
God damn it, Daniel Radcliffe plays Weird Al and Rainn Wilson plays Dr. Demento and the cast also has Patton Oswalt, Will Forte, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Conan O'Brien, Emo Philips, Thomas Lennon and Jack Black! Calm down, take deep breaths...look, the bright side here is that this film could maybe get me out of a giant linking jam next year, like I might need it coming out of the documentary chain or something. Maybe there's a reason I don't have a slot for it now, maybe it's all part of the great cosmic movie-linking plan - I don't want to watch it in January and then NEED it in August. Maybe I'd better think this through, give myself a few months to figure out what Roku is. Yeah, that's the play here.
THE PLOT: A teen living under house arrest becomes convinced his neighbor is a serial killer.
AFTER: OK, so it's not an EXACT clone of "Rear Window", but the basics are the same - enough to generate a lawsuit against Dreamworks from the Alfred Hitchcock estate, however the court decided that the two films are only similar at a basic level, that there were enough added subplots in "Disturbia" for it to not infringe on the copyright of that classic film, or the 1942 short story "It Had to Be Murder", on which the Hitchcock film was based. So there's the lesson, kids, if you're going to steal another movie's storyline, you've got to add in a bunch of other stuff or change enough details so that nobody recognizes the original any more. BUT, it's somehow OK for two films to have the same framework, which I guess makes sense. If I wanted to go make a movie about a love story set on the Titanic, I obviously wouldn't name the characters Jack and Rose and have them come from two different social classes, or maybe I'd make the male lead rich and the female lead poor, that might be enough for my new film "Love on the Titanic" to not get a cease-and-desist letter from James Cameron. I'm joking, anyway my goal is to do a remake of "Twister" and call it "Gone With the Wind". JK.
Anyway, thinking that your neighbor is really a serial killer is a universal occurence, at least in America, right? If you see your neighbor digging a hole in his yard with a shovel, is your first thought going to be that he's installing a pool, or that he's burying a body. The latter, right? Or maybe you've got a neighbor that keeps an odd schedule, comes and goes at all hours of the night, will you just write him off as an insomniac, somebody who works as a security guard on the night shift, or does your mind immediately determine that something more sinister is going on? The point here is that anybody with a pair of binoculars can figure out who on their block is cheating with whom, and what's going on behind closed doors. And the film's poster points out that "Every killer lives next to someone" and perhaps truer or creepier words were never spoken.
After his father dies in a car accident, teenager Kale gets in trouble at school, and punching his Spanish teacher gets him three months of house arrest, which at first doesn't seem all that bad of a punishment. Kale can sleep late, play video games, eat whatever and whenever he wants, but eventually his mother cuts off his TV and gaming and makes him do CHORES, and then somewhere between the laundry he does and all the cleaning he doesn't do, Kale starts to go a little crazy. Hey, we all had cabin fever during the pandemic, so this scenario should be very familiar to all of us by now - but then again, we weren't all wearing ankle bracelets and forbidden to get 100 feet from our house without alerting the Five-O.
Kale turns to watching all of his neighbors with binoculars, and one in particular is Ashley, the new hot teenage girl next door, who enjoys daily swimming and tanning sessions, also getting undressed without pulling the shades down. You know this film was written by a man, because later in the film, when she reveals that she knew Kale was spying on her, she took that as a compliment. Yeah, it's not cool to spy on women getting undressed, and I think the vast majority of women kind of feel that way about it. Who, exactly was the last woman to say, "Hey, I know you've been spying on me every night, watching me undress. Want to come over?" It's just never happened IRL.
For some reason, with the hottest and most messed-up attractive teen living within binocular range, Kale also turns his attention to another neighbor, Robert Turner. (This is a huge NITPICK POINT for me, because any normal, horny teen boy would keep those binoculars on Ashley's house, 24/7.). Kale suspects Turner of being a murdering murderer, because he drives a Ford Mustang that matches the description of the car of a serial killer mentioned on the news, somebody wanted in another state. He watches Turner have a hot date with a young woman, who's later seen leaving the house in a panic.
In another encounter, Turner is seen buying a shovel from a hardware store, and dragging a bloody bag into his garage, but there's always a semi-reasonable explanation for what he's doing, and even getting the police to search his house produces no evidence, meanwhile Turner seems to be trying to date Kale's mother, or maybe he just wants to get close enough to ask her how she could possibly name her son "Kale", ewww. Finally the movie has to pick a lane and decide if Kale is just a teen with an overactive imagination, or if Mr. Turner really is a killer, and the main character was right all along. If it helps you figure it out, bear in mind that the actor who plays Mr. Turner made his career playing very nice doctors and priests on TV, and then at some point he got sick of that and decided to play brutal villains in films like "The Green Mile" and "12 Monkeys". I guess an actor can only stand being typecast for so long.
I don't know, though, this film just kind of left me cold - maybe I just kept it on my list a bit too long - sometimes there's no way a film can possibly live up to the hype if I've put off watching it for years and then FINALLY get to it. It's like this lunch place I'm eating at, I popped in one day to get a soda and saw this delicious meat loaf, but I'd already eaten lunch. I made a mental note to come back the next Monday, but then meat loaf wasn't on the menu. Checked in every day for 2 weeks, no meat loaf - at this point I was DYING for some meat loaf, because I've set this as a goal and with every day that goes by, I've built up the imagined meat loaf experience to be a bigger and bigger thing. Then today, without warning, it was back on their steam table. So I bought it, and, eh, it was fine. Maybe I'll order it again someday, but it's still just meat loaf. Know what I mean?
Also starring Shia LaBeouf (last seen in "The Greatest Game Ever Played"), David Morse (last seen in "Horns"), Sarah Roemer, Aaron Yoo (last seen in "Gamer"), Jose Pablo Cantillo (last seen in "Cleaner"), Matt Craven (last seen in "Things You Can Tell Just by Looking at Her"), Viola Davis (last seen in "The Suicide Squad"), Luciano Rauso, Brando Caruso, Daniel Caruso, Kevin Quinn, Elyse Mirto (last seen in "The Rat Pack"), Suzanne Rico (last seen in "The Company Men"), Kent Shocknek (ditto), Rene Rivera (last seen in "It Can Happen to You"), Amanda Walsh (last seen in "Ghosts of Girlfriends Past"), Charles Carroll (last seen in "Nick of Time"), Gillian Shure, Dominic Daniel, Lisa Tobin, Cindy Lou Adkins
RATING: 5 out of 10 Twinkies glued together in a tower (umm, why not just EAT them?)
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