BEFORE: Wow, I had a day yesterday, I was late getting to the theater because the L train in Brooklyn was screwed up for like the 5,000th time in recent memory. The event yesterday was NewFest Pride, and it was the first day of June, which is Pride Month. NewFest is a NYC LGBTQ+ festival that was held for many years in October, and then eventually somebody said, "Hey, June is Pride Month, why don't we also have a smaller event in June, too?" Which of course just makes sense, and means an extra shift for me, so I'm all for it. When October rolls around I'm usually working NY Comic-Con, so I tend to miss a few days of NewFest in the fall.
We'll be celebrating Pride here at the Movie Year, too, but through some of the subjects in my Doc Block, from Rock Hudson, Billie Jean King, and Keith Haring to Elton John, Little Richard and Wham! So all of that is coming up, but because of Father's Day I wasn't able to schedule most of that in June, so July is the best that I could arrange.
Kevin Hart carries over from "Lift", and now he's WAY out in front, in first place with 9 appearances this year, and he's going to be tough to beat, at least until the documentary block is finished, then we'll see who's leading at the end of all that.
THE PLOT: Kevin Hart - playing a version of himself - is on a death-defying quest to become an action star. And with a little help from John Travolta, he just might pull it off.
AFTER: This is another new trend, for an actor to play a fictionalized version of themself, like Nicolas Cage did in "The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent", or like when Bill Murray was in "Zombieland". (or "Space Jam", or "Lost in Translation") I guess maybe it goes back to "Being John Malkovich" or maybe further, I'm not exactly sure. Or I guess it would be a hot new trend if it hadn't appeared so many times over the last 20 years. Anyway, Kevin Hart plays Kevin Hart here, perhaps the role he was born to play.
I'm not really sure how this film got made, because there's another listing in the IMDB for an Amazon SERIES with the same name, one which had 10 episodes in its first season, in 2020. So, is the movie a continuation of that series, or is it those 10 episodes edited together to be a movie-length movie? Looking through the cast lists, I'm guessing the latter is correct. Now I don't allow series episodes here in the Movie Year, but it looks like I'll have to allow a TV series that was re-edited into movie form, three years later. They've got me on a technicality, my hands are tied, because a TV movie is still a movie, according to my own rules. So my next guess is that they did the same thing with Season 2 of the show, they re-edited it into "Die Hart 2: Die Harter", which only just popped up on Amazon as a "movie". I can't watch it, though, because it doesn't link to my next film, and my plan is set in stone now, I have to stick with it and I can only add extra films if they don't mess with my linking. So I'm taking a pass on "Die Hart 2" and I'm kind of OK with that, had enough of Kevin Hart for a while. And if I don't circle back and pick that up later, yeah, I'm OK with that too.
We follow the fictional Kevin Hart as he has aspirations to headline an action movie, not play second fiddle to Dwayne Johnson, or Ice Cube, or Mark Wahlberg. Yeah, after this past week's movies, I can see the problem there. But to become a headliner he needs training, so the studio sends him to Ron Wilcox's action star boot camp. Oh, yeah, also Hart had a disastrous appearance on a talk show and it was conveniently decided that he should stay out of the public eye for a while - he's got an action movie lined up, but the director is very eccentric and also strict about Hart attending this boot camp.
What's really going on is that the boot camp is a cover for the action film's shooting, Hart is being filmed 24/7 in a "Truman Show" style, and also everyone around him is an actor, including the big beefy terrorist types who Hart saw threatening Mr. Wilcox. Nothing is real, everything is very meta, and so of course there's a film-within-the-film being made, the audience knows it and everybody knows it except poor clueless Kevin Hart. Well, at least the film will contain his genuine reactions to these events.
Naturally there's a love interest, too, a female actor/student who's also been sent to the boot camp, and part of the challenge, while learning how to pretend to save a stunt dummy from a burning building and also how to do wire-work love scenes, our hero also has to try to figure out what is real and what isn't. Well, at least it's a semi-original approach to an action movie format. What's that movie with Steve Martin and Eddie Murphy? "Bowfinger"? Yeah, it's kind of like that, where they were making a movie with an action star's involvement only he didn't know that a movie was being made around him. Yeah, I haven't seen that one in a while, it might be time for a re-watch.
Ah, but Wikipedia is now telling me the real story, the "Die Hart" series was originally made for Quibi, home of the 10-minute videos that went out of business in six months because it turned out that nobody wanted to pay money to watch 10-minute series episodes. Some of the TV shows made for Quibi were then bought up by Roku, which is I think what happened to a season of "Reno: 911" episodes. Roku had better luck with "Die Hart" than Quibi did, because they had a business model that allowed them to stay in business, and then I guess re-editing Season 1 of the show into a movie for Amazon was the next illogical step. It's all proof that nobody really knows how to be successful with streaming platforms, really every company is just throwing a bunch of crap against the proverbial wall to see what will stick and what won't.
It's just going to be like this for a while longer, with Roku and Pluto and Tubi all doing whatever they can to stay afloat, while companies with bigger budgets like Netflix and Amazon and Disney buying whatever they can or funding the production of their own exclusive content, anything to get a leg up on their rivals. It's ruthless out there, but each month as I go through the list of new films on Netflix and Amazon, I realize that the movie pie is being divided up into too many slices, because those slices are getting thinner and thinner - Netflix used to add like 100 movies a month, now it seems like if they add 50, that's a busy month for them. And so it goes...
Which leaves me watching a three-year old Quibi series that got cancelled, bought by Roku, and then re-edited for Amazon. It's kind of remarkable that produced a 90-minute movie that made any sense at all, while also being funny and more than slightly ridiculous. But I guess if anybody could do this, it would be Eric Appel, who also directed that fake biopic about Weird Al Yankovic.
Also starring John Travolta (last seen in "De Palma"), Nathalie Emmanuel, Jean Reno (also carrying over from "Lift"), Josh Hartnett (last seen in "Oppenheimer"), Kenneth Trujillo (last seen in "The Suicide Squad"), Eric Mainade, Joshua Lamboy (last seen in "Pitch Perfect 3"), Brandon Quinn, Milana Vayntrub (last seen in "Ghostbusters" (2016)), Stephan Jones (last seen in "Black Adam"), Jason Jones (last seen in "Framing John DeLorean"), Haley Dumas, Gary Weeks (last seen in "Ride Along"), Devin Scillian (last seen in "Scream 4").
RATING: 5 out of 10 hidden cameras (at least)
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