Project Almanac

Year 16, Day 155 - 6/3/24 - Movie #4,744

BEFORE: Here we go, my secret goal for ending the Kevin Hart chain with "Die Hart" was to allow Gary Weeks to carry over.  He was also in "Ride Along", but to end with that film, I wouldn't have been able to include "Ride Along 2", or I'd have to watch #2 before #1 in that franchise, but that wouldn't make sense.  

"Project Almanac" has been on my list for a very long time, perhaps longer than any film.  Considering that I put it on a DVD with "Hot Tub Time Machine 2" that probably means it came into my possession in 2016 or 2017, but it could have been on the "Someday/Maybe" list even longer, since 2015 maybe.  Anyway, the film is 10 years old so let's assume that it took me 8 or 9 years to get to it - apparently I'm nothing if not patient.  

What I did was separate out all the time-travel films, like this and "Butterfly Effect 2" (and 3), then came "Paradox" and "Synchronicity" and a few others, but over time it was easier for me to link to the ones that were also romances, like "Needle in a Timestack", or with more popular actors, like "A Wrinkle in Time", but then in 2018 or 2019 I got more hardcore with the linking, and that left a few time-travel films stranded, as they're very hard to link to.  Still, I managed to link to "Time Lapse" and "Time Freak" somehow, and then this year I snuck in "See You Yesterday", but still, the plan all started with THIS one, from 2014, and well, it's been a long road getting here, I hope it was worth the effort. 

There's an outside chance I might be able to sneak another one or two in with horror movies in October, but it will take some more careful planning.  If I don't, well, there's always next year, right? 

FOLLOW-UP TO: "See You Yesterday" (Movie #4,698), "Time Freak" (Movie #3,941), "Time Lapse" (Movie #3,603)

THE PLOT: A group of teens discovers secret plans for a time machine, and construct one.  However, things start to get out of control.  

AFTER: Generally speaking, time-travel movies need to have some visual effects, but they don't have to be overdone.  "Primer" just used a storage unit as the time machine, so they didn't need to do a lot of set construcion, just find a storage company willing to rent out a unit as a set.  "Looper" had some pretty cool effects, if I remember correctly (it's past time for a rewatch, no doubt)

Time travel movies also seem to work best when the travelers are trying to accomplish something, like maybe saving the world - so "Project Almanac" kind of turns that requirement around by giving the ability to time-travel to a group of teenagers, and even though they start out with the best intentions - David Raskin needs a sizzle reel that will get him a scholarship to go to MIT - before long the teenagers are tempted to use the device to better their grades, or get revenge on a bully, or go to the Imagine Dragons concert three months ago.  What could POSSIBLY go wrong?

To be fair, there are some constraints here that narrow down what they're able to do, or rather WHEN they're able to do it.  At first the device can only bring them back one day, then refinements bring the potential travel up to three weeks in the past.  (Apparently the device can't travel forward to events that haven't happened yet, or else they don't consider using the device this way...). So going back and killing Hitler as a baby is off the table from the start, and thus the film neatly avoids the paradox that would be created by changing a notable historical event.  (The paradox is, If they go back and kill baby Hitler, they also eliminate the NEED to kill Hitler in the first place, so they've changed reality to one that they didn't need to fix, therefore in the new reality they never did or will do that, because they would exist in a reality where that didn't need to be done, so they didn't go back and do that, so Hitler would be alive again.)

The whole thing starts when ambitious science high-school nerd David finds his late father's video camera, and while watching footage of his own seventh birthday party (which was the day before his father died in a car crash) David spots someone in the footage that looks exactly like 17-year-old him, watching the party from the other room.  But how could 17-year-old David be at the party for 7-year old David?  And why is he carrying a strange backpack, why does he have that stain on his shirt, and overall, WTF?  This leads David and his two friends to search his father's lab, where they find a copy of the guvmint's instructions on how to build a time machine.  And they know that it MUST be successful, because how else would David be able to crash his own birthday party 10 years ago? 

(Finding someone else's instructions neatly avoids another paradox, because if someone in the future invents a time machine, it would be so easy for them to go back in time, meet their younger self and deliver those schematics, and then we'd all be wondering who invented the time machine, the older guy or the younger version of himself.)

The three nerds stay up all night in the basement for weeks, wiring circuit boards and searching for ways to get more power to the machine, sacrificing gaming consoles and other home electronics, stealing power from car batteries, etc.  NITPICK POINT: What they really needed here was a Marty McFly line of dialogue here, something like, "Wait a minute, are you telling me you built a time machine.... out of an XBOX?"  David, who's very inept when it comes to talking with girls, manages to make contact with Jessie, thanks to a back-pack mix-up and also from getting caught draining her car's battery with jumper cables.  So the three male nerds, along with Jessie and David's sister Christina (who mans the video camera for most of this "found footage" movie, so we hardly ever see her) end up driving out to the woods and jumping back 24 hours, just to have proof of concept.  When they return, they accidentally bring the neighbor's dog forward in time with them, and then they notice that the street is filled with "Lost Dog" flyers that weren't there before.  This is proof that they were able to change reality with their actions, the dog being missing for 24 hours caused its owners to print up flyers. 

This should have been the end of things, surely proving to the enrollment board at M.I.T. that time travel is possible should have secured David both entry and a scholarship, but of course the teens don't stop there.  They go back in time with the winning lotto numbers in order to save the Raskin house from foreclosure, and while it didn't work exactly as they'd planned, it was at least a partial success.  Then they use time travel to beat the science teacher's impromptu morning questions, and after that, they're only interested in becoming more popular at school.  Umm, sure, that's noble, right?  But then David gets the idea to buy some "useless" backstage passes for that Imagine Dragons concert three months ago, and treats his friends by taking them back to when those items were still valid.  Fine, but couldn't he have picked a better band?  I mean, really....were the Rolling Stones not on tour that year? 

It's when David realizes that he missed an opportunity to kiss Jessie, and then goes back to fix it, that things start to really go off the rails.  The film avoids the other time-travel paradox of "What happens when you encounter your past self, but you don't have any memory from your past self of meeting your future self?" (think about it, you'll get there...) by showing that when your current self gets too close to your past self, you both get caught in some kind of feedback loop, and one of you "glitches" out, and apparently eventually ceases to exist, and paradox therefore averted.  Umm, I'm not sure the universe works this way, but whatever, the teens then have to learn to avoid the "glitch" by removing the past self from the equation, like getting him dismissed from school or sending him on a wild goose-chase errand, or just shoving him in a locker for a while, any solution will do.  But this leads to NITPICK POINT #2 because they show that it takes like 47 tries for Allen to beat the science teacher's questions, and that means that they had to distract the past Allen 46 times, or there are 47 future Allens walking around the school at the same time, or shoved in to 47 lockers, and that's a lot of chances for that glitch thing to happen.  

Eventually the teens realize that their messing around with reality has done more harm than good, somehow robberies and arsons are increased in the area (hmm, it could be all those stupid time travelers stealing machine parts and hydrogen, just a thought) but also the school has lost the championship basketball game, and also there was a plane crash in Europe that could have been caused by the "butterfly effect" resulting from one of their trips through time. (It's complicated, I won't get into it here...).  So eventually David realizes that he has to go back, way back, and make sure that he never discovered those plans for the machine in the first place. 

This takes him back to - you guessed it - that birthday party, which is essentially a fait accompli, but at least he gets to see his father one more time, and his father gets to meet 17-year-old David, and if you wonder why David didn't tell his father more about the future or his own fate, well, just watch "The Flash" from last year, the reasoning is essentially the same, just a little less complicated here.   Really, this is right on point with Father's Day coming up, so it's one more piece of evidence that my chain has a mind of its own, or else it's all just coincidence.  Future David blinks out, and reality returns to one where he never gets into M.I.T. or invents time travel - or does it?  Unfortunately there are still paradoxes that result here - and some screenwriter tried SO HARD to avoid them!

Well, the benefit of me taking so long to watch "Project Almanac" is that even though I burned it to DVD eight or nine years ago, the movie scrolled off cable, was not available for some time, but now it's BACK on premium cable channels, either Starz or Paramount/Showtime, I think.  So I was able to watch it On Demand, plus with subtitles, and right now you can too!  

Directed by Dean Israelite

Also starring Jonny Weston (last seen in "Taken 3"), Sofia Black-D'Elia (last seen in "The Promise"), Sam Lerner (last seen in "Nobody Walks"), Allen Evangelista, Virginia Gardner, Amy Landecker (last seen in "Clear History"), Macsen Lintz (last seen in "Hall Pass"), Gary Grubbs (last seen in "Free State of Jones"), Michelle DeFraites, Jamila Thompson (last seen in "John Lewis: Good Trouble"), Katie Garfield (last seen in "The Birth of a Nation"), Courtney Bowers, Patrick Johnson, Joshua Brady (last seen in "Hillbilly Elegy"), Danielle Rizzo, Mychael Bates (last seen in "Frankie and Johnny"), Onira Tares, Mani Yarosh, Andrew Benator (last seen in "Game Night"), Aaron Marcus (last seen in "A Man Called Otto"), Andre Nemec, Anthony Reynolds (last seen in "After the Sunset"), Brett David Stelter, Cameron Fuller (last seen in "Barley Lethal"), Derrin Jordan with a cameo from Imagine Dragons. 

RATING: 7 out of 10 trips on the water slide

Die Hart

Year 16, Day 154 - 6/2/24 - Movie #4,743

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.

Directed by Eric Appel (director of "Weird: The Al Yankovic Story")

 

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)

Lift

Year 16, Day 153 - 6/1/24 - Movie #4,742

BEFORE: June is here, and so is the screening format breakdown for May: 

4 Movies watched on cable (saved to DVD): Destiny Turns on the Radio, Being Rose, Because I Said So, Pain & Gain

6 Movies watched on cable (not saved): Barbie, Georgia Rule, Stoker, Father Stu, The Big Hit, Shooter

7 watched on Netflix: Dumb Money, Poms, Penguin Bloom, Fear, Me Time, Ride Along, Kevin Hart & Chris Rock: Headliners Only

1 watched on iTunes: Kill Your Darlings
1 watched on Amazon Prime: Once Upon a Crime

1 watched on Peacock: It's a Disaster

1 watched on Tubi: Ride Along 2

21 TOTAL

Oh, right, I took that trip to North Carolina so May was a short month.  But here are the links that should get me past Father's Day and to the end of June: Gary Weeks, Amy Landecker, Patton Oswalt, David Koechner, Dennis Quaid, David Herman, Stephen Root, Susan Sarandon, Harvey Guillen, Natasha Rothwell, Hugh Grant, Sebastian Maniscalco, Robert De Niro, Dinah Shore, David Letterman, John Belushi, Penny Marshall, David Letterman (again), and Donald Trump.  Yeah, that looks like some documentaries coming up in June for sure. 

Kevin Hart carries over again from "Kevin Hart & Chris Rock: Headliners Only". 

FOLLOW-UP TO: "The Misfits" (Movie #4,431)

THE PLOT: Follows a master thief and his Interpol Agent ex-girlfriend who team up to steal $500 million in gold bullion being transported on an A380 passenger flight. 

AFTER: Well, it's clear that screenwriters share a common belief that if you just put the right team of experts together, you can accomplish anything, including impossible things.  You need a master-mind thief, for sure, and then you also need (in some order) a hacker, a safe-cracker, a pilot (or getaway driver) and a disguise expert.  Throw in a martial arts expert or a demolitions expert if you've got room.  This is, of course, recognizable as the "Mission: Impossible" formula, however it's a bit like a xerox machine, every time you make a copy of a copy, the result gets a bit harder to read or understand.  For this one and the last film that followed the formula ("The Misfits") the guy who's the disguise expert only seems to be able to disguise himself, not other team members, and in both cases, his disguise efforts just weren't very good, he still looked like either Nick Cannon or Vincent D'Onofrio, no matter what he did.  Umm, technically that's the opposite of an expert, if he's not very good at what he does - MAYBE think about replacing that guy, if he's not pulling his weight. 

Now, we just need an idea for a heist that requires hacking, safecracking, piloting a plane, and some martial arts and blowing stuff up, and we'll be all set.  Yes, I know this seems like building something backwards, or from the top floor down, but apparently this is how movies get made in Hollywood now, you have to tick all the same boxes that the LAST heist film did, because how else are you going to duplicate that film's success?  Write something original?  Nah nah NAH that just sounds too risky.  Tom Cruise did a thing with a plane, so let's just do a thing with a plane too.  That movie with Pierce Brosnan did a switcheroo with a pile of gold bars so let's just do a similar switcheroo too.  And make sure the guy who can't really disguise himself as somebody else tries to disguise himself a few times, even though it's really not crucial to the plot in any way.  LET HIM HAVE IT, because really, that's all he has. 

This is the heist formula, apparently you can't change it if you want to be successful and entertain America, even if it's only on Netflix. Other elements you may have seen before, in addition to the ragtag bunch of misfits with particular skill sets include:  

An Interpol agent who hires the team and promises them amnesty from criminal prosecution if they help out the good guys for once. 

The fact that Interpol agent had an (accidental) one-week relationship with the criminal mastermind, while she was undercover.  Jeez, you don't suppose that by working together on this job that they'll somehow get closer together and forgive each other for the past deceptions and maybe have a chance at a lasting relationship in the future, despite being on opposite sides of the law?  

People swapping out gold-colored iron bars for real gold bars, and moving them around very easily, despite the fact that gold is one of the damned heaviest things in the world, but yet when it come times to steal them, somehow thieves find a way to subvert the laws of physics.  

"Lift" doubles down on all these common tropes of heist films, then adds a few new impossible wrinkles of its own.  Most prominent is a private jet that is co-opted by the team, and somehow given the ability to fly right under the commerical airliner and duplicate/steal its radio signal, so that when the airliner is diverted, it will still appear to air traffic control to still be on course. Most likely this is ACTUALLY impossible, not just "Mission: Impossible"-style very unlikely.  For starters, we can assume that there should be some kind of security protocol used by ATC that would prevent this from happening.  So this is NITPICK POINT #1, I don't believe it's possible for a small jet to somehow steal the signal of another plane.  I also think that it's probably impossible to cover that jet with stealth-tiles, whatever those are, and for it then to be able to take off after being covered in those tiles.  But screw it, let the screenwriter create whatever they want, magic is just technology invented by a writer that doesn't exist yet, right? 

NITPICK POINT #2 tells me that nobody would put 19 tons of gold into a commercial airliner, because this magical second cargo level just does not exist, there's the passengers, there's the luggage compartment and...well, that's it, we're full.  Cargo goes on CARGO planes, not passenger planes.  If a passenger plane were carrying billions of dollars of gold, this is exactly what would happen, somebody would try to hijack it, putting all of those passengers at risk.  Nope, it's just not gonna happen in the real world. NITPICK POINT #2.5 tells me that even if you DID put 19 tons of gold into a plane, how the hell would that plane be able to take off?  Worse, you have to double that weight when you consider that the dummy gold made of iron or whatever is also aboard the plane.  Yeah, it's not leaving the runway then.  

NITPICK POINTS #3-6 - but this is a MAGIC plane, I guess.  It can fly upside-down for a long period of time, it can do a nose-dive without slamming its passengers into the rear wall, and it can pull out of that nose-dive without breaking into pieces.  Also it can shake off those stealth tiles just by doing a couple of barrel rolls, once they're no longer needed. Very handy.  And also when you can't land it on a runway, you can just find an icy road at the top of a mountain and land it there, who cares if that road is only 100 feet long, you can make it work.  

NITPICK POINT #7 - clearly screenwriters don't understand what NFTs are, either, but I guess that's OK because nobody anywhere really does. 

NITPICK POINT #8 - Cyrus and his crew steal a famous painting in London by causing a distraction at an auction house in Venice.  There's simply no way in the world this makes any sense, because even if their disruption disables or confuses the security in one location, that would have exactly ZERO impact on the security systems, alarms and guards in another building in another country, hundreds of miles away.  In what universe does this plot point make sense? 

OK, new proposed conversion method, five NITPICK POINTS means one point off my score. That seems about fair, right? 

Directed by F. Gary Gray (director of "Straight Outta Compton")

Also starring Gugu Mbatha-Raw (last seen in "Fast Color"), Vincent D'Onofrio (last seen in "Dumb Money"), Ursula Corbero, Billy Magnussen (last seen in "No Time to Die"), Yun Jee Kim, Jacob Batalon (last seen in "Spider-Man: No Way Home"), Jean Reno (last seen in "The Promise"), Sam Worthington (last seen in "Avatar: The Way of Water"), Paul Anderson (last seen in "Nightmare Alley"), Viveik Kalra (last seen in "Blinded by the Light"), Burn Gorman (last seen in "Enola Holmes"), David Proud, Oli Green, Ross Anderson (last seen in "Macbeth" (2015)) Stefano Skalkotos, Martina Avogadri, Jess Liaudin (last seen in "Maleficent: Mistress of Evil"), Caroline Loncq (last seen in "The Protégé"), Alessandro Quattro, Morgan C. Jones, Nadira Tudor, Polly Middlehurst (last seen in "The 355"), Michael Absalom (last seen in "Extinction"), Andrew Wilson, Gerard Monaco (last seen in "Holmes & Watson"), Roy McCrerey (last seen in "One Missed Call"), Erol Ismail, Gordon Alexander (also last seen in "No Time to Die"), Russ Bain, Amit Dhut, Mark Hampton, Gary Fannin (last seen in "Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny"), Alfredo Tavares. 

 

RATING: 6 out of 10 first-class tickets (will that be "hijacking" or "non-hijacking"?)

Kevin Hart & Chris Rock: Headliners Only

Year 16, Day 152 - 5/31/24 - Movie #4,741

BEFORE: OK, maybe too many action/comedy movies in a row, I need to shake things up a little.  Kevin Hart carries over from "Ride Along 2".

I know, this is a documentary, about his comedy tour with Chris Rock.  And the Doc Block isn't scheduled to start until mid-June, so why put this one here?  Honestly, I tried to fit this one into the schedule for the upcoming documentary chain, but it doesn't fit.  Well, that's not really true, it DOES fit, but only in one specific place, between a documentary about Chris Farley and another one about Albert Brooks - as you might expect, because Chris Rock was on SNL with Farley and a lot of comedians appear to talk about Mr. Brooks.  BUT that space is occupied by a documentary about John Belushi, and I can't fit them both in the chain there, that won't work.  That Belushi doc has been on my list for probably three years or more, so it takes precedence, I don't want to put it off yet another time.  So I'm sneaking the doc that WON'T fit into the chain here, between two movies with Kevin Hart in them.  

I could probably tear the doc chain apart and put it back together another way, and fit this one in there, but that's a lot of work, I'd rather not mess with it at this point.  I could skip it, but then I don't like the way my slots line up, I'm not crazy about which film lands on spot #4,750, so this one goes here and solves that little problem, too.  

THE PLOT: Follows two comedy icons behind the scenes throughout a tour of New York City area venues as they tell firsthand accounts of their early lives, their struggles, their triumphs and their brotherhood. 

AFTER: This is another weird film, because it's technically a documentary, but who the heck needs a doc about a comedy tour?  Why not just air the footage FROM the event itself?  The team-up was called the "Rock-Hart tour", and that's kind of cool because it sounds a lot like "Rock Hard". But Kevin Hart's got like five comedy specials (at least) on Netflix, why not just one more?  Because what's glaringly missing here is the comedy concert footage from Madison Square Garden - we see the two famous comics doing mic checks at MSG, we see them backstage at MSG, we see the intros to their routines, but NOT the routines themselves.  There's even footage of the post-show, where Hart gives Rock an actual GOAT as a present, as a way of telling him that he's the "Greatest Of All Time" in comedy, but umm, and look, I guess that means the mini-tour went well, but jeez, I'd really like to see that for myself.  

Last year I endured the similar doc "Idina Menzel: Which Way to the Stage?" which showed the acclaimed Broadway actress and singer touring across the country, preparing for her big concert at the same venue, Madison Square Garden (which is neither square nor a garden, but that's beside the point).  And then once she got there, OF COURSE there was footage of her singing songs for the crowd at MSG, including OF COURSE "Let It Go", which nobody needed to hear again.  But that's called the PAY-OFF, you don't detail the road to something in a doc and then NOT show us that thing, because then what the hell did we waste the last 80 or 90 minutes building up to?  

Look, I can easily see myself complaining if there was TOO much footage of Kevin Hart and Chris Rock's routines on the MSG stage - then I probably wouldn't consider this a documentary at all, then it would just be a concert film, or a regular-like Netflix comedy special.  So clearly they were going for something that wasn't ALL comedy routines, let's shake it up a bit and ask other comedians like Jerry Seinfeld and Wanda Sykes how they know our two headliners, when did they first see them perform, what makes them special, etc.  That's all fine, but then to not air ANY of the concert footage, that's a damn shame.  It's literally why we showed up to watch this film, to see the funny people being funny.  So I'm not saying there needed to be a lot, but I think there at least needed to be a little. 

Then the other problem is that their backstories are so matter-of-fact.  I went to this club, I was hired for this TV show, I was in this movie with Ice-T, that's all just a bit dry - and limited by which pieces of movie footage they were able to license. (My biggest challenge with linking these docs is that the IMDB listings for archive footage are usually incomplete, so I usually end up submitting a bunch of additions to the IMDB editors, and sometimes they believe me, and sometimes they don't, but I do what I can to make the listings more completer.). Do we need to know about Kevin Hart's sit-com "Big House" that got cancelled before it could air?  No, we do not, because who cares?  Everybody has failures on their resume, because not everything can be a hit, it's just that simple. 

OK, maybe both comedians had specials on Netflix that featured the same material that they performed in these NYC venues.  I guess I could see why Netflix wouldn't want to compete with itself, like you might not tune it two watch the latest Kevin Hart comedy special if you'd heard half of his routines before, like in some weird documentary about doing stand-up on tour in four locations in the same part of the country.  

Oh, but Dave Chappelle also joins the tour for the big MSG event, and both Hart and Rock weren't sure if he was going to show up until just days before the show.  They admit, Dave's gonna do whatever Dave wants to do, and also the reverse of that, he's not going to do what he doesn't want to do. Friends like Jay-Z show up backstage, and also the new mayor of NYC, Eric Adams, who often sounds like he's doing stand-up himself during his press conferences, except they're not funny and often don't make any sense. 

The big draw to me is learning more about Chris Rock's time on SNL, how he couldn't get many of his written sketches approved for broadcast, so he's probably got a grudge against the head writer at the time (Conan O'Brien?) and also why he left the show after only a couple of seasons to appear on the rival sketch show "In Living Color" instead.  This probably would have been a terrible career move if he hadn't hit it big in movies shortly after that, with appearances in "Lethal Weapon 4", "Dogma" and the animated films "Osmosis Jones", "Doctor Dolittle" and the "Madagascar" series.  Everything kind of turned out fine, more or less.  

Kevin Hart, same deal, once his "Big House" sitcom got cancelled, that only made him more determined to hit it big, even if he had to make a couple of stinker movies like "Soul Plane" and "Scary Movie 3" before long he stood t in small roles in "The 40-Year Old Virgin" and "Fool's Gold", "Meet Dave" and "Drillbit Taylor".  There you go, just keep working and hustling until you've got a starring role in "Think Like a Man" or "Ride Along".  So I guess it took both of these comedians/actors years or hard work before they could be considered "overnight successes".  There's a lesson in there somewhere about hard work and paying your dues, I suppose. 

I wish both men great success, of course, but I just wish the documentary made about their NYC shows could have been a little more engaging, somehow. 

Directed by Rashidi Natara Harper

Also starring Chris Rock (last seen in "Rustin"), Bill Burr (last seen in "Dog"), Cedric the Entertainer (last seen in "Street Kings"), Dave Chappelle (last seen in "Can We Take a Joke?"), Tiffany Haddish (last seen in "The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent"), D.L. Hughley, Jay-Z (last seen in "De Palma"), Tony Rock, Jerry Seinfeld (last seen in "The Super Bob Einstein Movie"), Wanda Sykes (last seen in "Monster-in-Law"), Eric Adams, Tina Farris, Robert Hart, Caroline Hirsch, Will "Spank" Horton (last seen in "Ride Along"), Keith Robinson, 

with archive footage of Dave Attell (last seen in "Mr. Warmth - The Don Rickles Project"), Roseanne Barr (last seen in "Frank Sinatra: One More for the Road"), Jim Carrey (last seen in "Val"), Dana Carvey (last seen in "Jack and Jill"), Louis C.K. (last seen in "I Love You, Daddy"), Chris Farley, Flea (last seen in "Babylon"), David Alan Grier (last seen in "Coffee & Kareem"), Arsenio Hall (last seen in "That's My Boy"), Phil Hartman (last seen in "Nothing Compares"), Jan Hooks (ditto), Steve Harvey (last seen in "Think Like a Man"), Kate Hudson (last seen in "Alex & Emma"), Ice-T, Reggie Jackson (last seen in "Say Hey, Willie Mays!"), Victoria Jackson, Sam Kinison (last seen in "George Carlin's American Dream"), Jon Lovitz (last seen in "I Could Never Be Your Woman"), Bernie Mac, Howie Mandel (also last seen in "Can We Take a Joke?"), Matthew McConaughey (last heard in "Sing 2"), Mike Myers (last seen in "Amsterdam"), Dennis Miller (last seen in "Jagged"), Eddie Murphy (last seen in "You People"), Patrice O'Neal, Colin Quinn (also last seen in "That's My Boy"), Joan Rivers (last seen in "Listening to Kenny G"), Adam Sandler (last seen in "Jack and Jill"), David Spade (last seen in "The Wrong Missy"), Robert Townsend, Damon Wayans (last seen in "Bulletproof"), Keenan Ivory Wayans, 

RATING: 4 out of 10 early appearances at the Comedy Cellar

Ride Along 2

Year 16, Day 151 - 5/30/24 - Movie #4,740

BEFORE: May's almost over, so I'm just taking it easy today, sleeping in because June's going to be very busy, it's festival month at the theater, so I don't have a LOT of shifts scheduled, but the ones I have are all 10 or 12 hours long, so it's going to be a marathon.  At my other job, my boss is constantly running out of money and coming up with more and more desperate attempts to make money and pay his bills, but nothing seems to be working.  Part of me wishes he'd just retire, which would solve a few problems for me but probably create a few others, too.  I've been job-hunting for maybe two years now and been close a couple of times, but nothing's come together for me on that front, so I'm kind of stuck until I can make some kind of big move, or I just have to quit and lay low for a while, but that doesn't feel right to me either.  

Kevin Hart carries over again from "Ride Along", and now we have a tie. 

THE PLOT: As his wedding day approaches, Ben heads to Miami with his soon-to-be brother-in-law James to bring down a drug dealer who's supplying the dealers of Atlanta with product. 

AFTER: Nothing succeeds like success, I suppose - and if you can spend $40 million making a movie that brings in $125 million, of course you should keep doing that.  But notice that they announced a third film in the "Ride Along" franchise back in 2016, and so far it has not been made.  Sure, there was a pandemic and everything, but still, if it were really necessary you'd think it would have happened by now.  The "Bad Boys" franchise has a new film coming out, and that's the second sequel to the original two movies, so they're kind of in overtime there.  Now i bet someone was wishing they'd saved "Bad Boys for Life" for the fourth film so there could be a prominent number FOUR on the poster.  "Ride or Die", what does that even mean?  Anyway tonight's film was almost called "Ride Along: Ride 2gether" but cooler heads eventually prevailed. 

A lot of stuff gets thrown at us in this film, and sure, it would be nice if all made sense, but that's not nearly as important as getting Ice Cube to act tough and Kevin Hart to be loud and crazy.  Yeah, those seem to be the primary goals - but also rookie cop Ben Barber is getting married, and clashing with the wedding planner, so it makes sense (?) for his future brother-in-law James to take him to Miami for an undercover operation.  I'm just kidding, it makes no sense at all for Atlanta cops to track down a drug dealer / arms dealer in Miami, because they're way out of their jurisdiction.  Police can't just go to another city and start shooting people, we'd have chaos all over this country if that were allowed, so I'm pretty sure it's not. 

Sure, we have the internet now and illegal things are brought into ports every day, I suppose, and then people load guns or drugs onto trucks and drive them wherever, but we're a nation of laws, and the police have to follow the laws and the rules of engagement, and if there's interstate trafficking going on, isn't that what we have federal agents for?  But no, why should a screenwriter learn how police work really functions, because that would just get in the way of a situation where Kevin Hart can act wild and crazy.  It's about priorities, people.  

Also, this is somehow even more confusing than the first "Ride Along" film, but the tradition continues of having a villain who's somehow into both drugs and guns and works completely in the shadows, the difference here is that he's masquerading as a normal Miami millionaire, and he's buying up politicians and port commissioners to make everything go smoothly.  Only he forgot about the hacker he used to, umm, do what, exactly?  This is where the story falls apart, because it's really unclear what the hacker does for the drug kingpin, and why he turns against his boss after a much-too-long foot chase through Miami's affluent suburban backyards.  

Ken Jeong is fine, but there's a few too many people from "The Masked Singer" in this film, with Jeong, Sherri Shepherd and Kevin Hart, who made a completely ridiculous appearance on one of this season's early shows, allegedly just to "prank" Nick Cannon, only that's not how the show works.  Clearly Kevin Hart wanted to be on the show, but also wanted to guarantee that he wouldn't have to sing for more than one episode.  

Really, this film is proof that you just can't have it both ways, you can't make an action/crime film that the audience can take seriously if you also want to have Kevin Hart falling out of a boat and being dragged behind it for comic effect.  That just CAN'T be in the same movie.

NITPICK POINT: Cutting to imaginary video-game footage in the middle of a car chase may seem like it's in line with Ben's gaming background, however it's just as likely this was done because creating live footage of those stunts was either too difficult or too expensive.  Like, how am I supposed to know the difference? 

Directed by Tim Story (director of "Ride Along")

Also starring Ice Cube, Tika Sumpter, Bruce McGill (all carrying over from "Ride Along"), Benjamin Bratt (last seen in "Snitch"), Olivia Munn (last seen in "I Don't Know How She Does It"), Ken Jeong (last seen in "Pain & Gain"), Michael Rose (last seen in "Pitch Perfect 3"), Sherri Shepherd (last seen in "Think Like a Man"), Arturo del Puerto (last seen in "CHIPS"), Eric Goins (also last seen in "Ride Along"), Lucius Baston (ditto), Carlos Gomez (last seen in "The Replacement Killers"), Utkarsh Ambudkar (last seen in "Marry Me"), Glen Powell (last heard in "Apollo 10 1/2: A Space Age Childhood"), Nadine Velazquez (also last seen in "Snitch"), Bresha Webb (last seen in "Night School"), James Martin Kelly (last seen in "The War with Grandpa"), Robert Pralgo (last seen in "Jerry and Marge Go Large"), Tyrese Gibson (last seen in "The Christmas Chronicles; Part Two"), Ricky Russert (last seen in "I, Tonya"), Christopher Johnson, Jay Amor, Peter Parente, Rey Hernandez (also last seen in "Pain & Gain"), Yolanda Adams, Tip "T.I." Harris (last seen in "Monster Hunter"), Rick Ross (last seen in "Coming 2 America")

RATING: 4 out of 10 trash can nachos

Ride Along

Year 16, Day 150 - 5/29/24 - Movie #4,739

BEFORE: OK, so the initial goal was to have Mark Wahlberg and Kevin Hart as co-leaders with the most appearances this year, that seemed fair since they were co-stars in "Me Time", but I sort of forgot that Kevin Hart was in three films in February, that's given him a clear advantage, so by June 1 he'll have the top spot by himself, and he'll probably still be leading when I start the Doc Block in mid-June, but really, after that all bets are off, because somebody like Dick Cavett or Richard Nixon will probably be in so many documentaries via archive footage, that it won't really matter any more.  But enjoy the lead while it lasts, Kevin Hart. 

Kevin Hart carries over from "Me Time"

THE PLOT: Security guard Ben must prove himself to his girlfriend's brother, top police officer James, so he rides along on a 24-hour patrol of Atlanta. 

AFTER: Sure, there are action movies that have elements of comedy to them, but when someone tries to make a film that's both action AND comedy, it's very tricky - most often they end up with something like this, that feels like it doesn't know which thing it wants to be. It kind of toggles between the two things, and maybe there's just no film that's a true representation of both genres at the same time.  "Bad Boys", "21 Jump Street", "The Nice Guys", they all kind of suffer from this same problem, as not every film can be "Lethal Weapon" or "48 Hrs." or "Free Guy". 

There's so much of this story that wasn't clear to me, like what was the mystery man, Omar, really involved in.  Police officer James tries to get him on some fake passport operation, but isn't he an arms dealer?  Drug dealer?  What does any of that have to do with passports?  Or is he some kind of criminal mastermind who's involved in a whole conglomeration of vertically integrated crime-like things?  It's a bit tough to say.  

James has been after him for years, but the problem seems to be that nobody knows what Omar looks like, because everyone who's seen him ends up dead, including the people who work for him.  OK, so what then is anyone's incentive to go to work for Omar in the first place?  How does he retain any loyal followers at all if he (or somebody) keeps killing them?  Well, we have to put a pin in that one for now, because there's more going down, as high-school security guard and platinum-level video game player Ben wants to marry James' sister, Angela, but first he feels that he needs James' approval, so James takes future police cadet Ben along with him on patrol, with the idea that he'll show Ben how tough it is to be a cop, and when Ben can't handle it, he'll change his mind about going to the police academy, and probably marrying Angela, too.  Umm, sure, that tracks. 

James takes all of the "nuisance" calls from the police dispatcher, and Ben has to deal with a gang of bikers that block the handicapped parking spaces, also a drunk and disorderly patron at a market, who's really a poker buddy of James', in disguise.  In the midst of all this, James talks to an informant, who accidentally lets some information slip about an arms deal with some Serbians, which might be connected to Omar somehow.  But then the two men end up in a strip club with some real armed thugs, and by now Ben has figured out that he's been taken on a series of nuisance calls, so naturally he assumes that the real gunmen in the strip club are just another set-up arranged by James.  Ha ha, what a farce, to confuse real, armed criminals for fake ones!  

Honestly, the fake calls I could understand, but the REAL information from the informants about the arms deal was very confusing.  I think I fell asleep a couple of times while trying to sort it all out, and that's not a good sign for an action film.  OK, sure I was tired from a long shift at the theater, but still, an action movie should be able to keep me alert for 90 minutes, and "Ride Along" just didn't do that.  Not even Kevin Hart's high-pitched screams after getting shot in the leg could keep me awake, and that's saying something.  

On the comedy front, it's kind of a fail, too - I thought this was one of the classic films (it's 10 years old now) that MADE Kevin Hart's career, but in the end it wasn't that funny either.  So it's neither fish nor foul, therefore - not funny enough to be a true comedy, and not enough action to keep me awake, either.  Somehow this was a big hit, though, it made over $150 million, and that's in 2014 money.  That's over six times its budget, so a bona fide hit, no matter how you look at it.  I might as well knock off the sequel tomorrow, but honestly my expectations aren't that high, I'll just be doing that to cross one more film off the list. 

Directed by Tim Story (director of "Think Like a Man Too")

Also starring Ice Cube (last seen in "The Super Bob Einstein Movie"), John Leguizamo (last seen in "The Menu"), Bruce McGill (last seen in "Poms"), Tika Sumpter (last seen in "Think Like a Man"), Bryan Callen (last seen in "Walk of Shame"), Laurence Fishburne (last seen in "The School for Good and Evil"), Gary Owen (last seen in "Think Like a Man Too"), Dragos Bucur (last seen in "The Way Back"), Jacob Latimore (last seen in "The Last Summer"), Jay Pharoah (last heard in "The Mitchells vs. the Machines"), Benjamin Flores Jr. (last heard in "Happy Feet Two"), Jasmine Burke, David Banner (last seen in "The Boss"), Gary Weeks (last seen in "The Tomorrow War"), John Kap (last seen in "Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Road Chip"), Anona Tolar, Dwayne L. Brown, Lou Anne Cooper, James Logan (last seen in "Greenland", Chase Steven Anderson (last seen in "Father Figures"), Kenny Alfonso (last seen in "Jerry and Marge Go Large"), Aaron Saxton, Bill Neenan, Will "Spank" Horton (last heard in "Tom & Jerry"), Eric Goins (last seen in "Boss Level"), Lucius Baston (last seen in "Secret Headquarters"), Drew Goin, Fernando Gonzalez (last seen in "Employee of the Month"), Jordan Rios.

RATING: 4 out of 10 quotes from "Training Day"

Me Time

Year 16, Day 149 - 5/28/24 - Movie #4,738 - FATHER'S DAY FILM #1

BEFORE: Ah, a film about how to spend your leisure time, or needing leisure time, or something - so I hope you had some leisure time this past weekend, and I hope you spent it well.  Just as Memorial Day is the "unofficial" start of summer (whatever that means, but every single news anchor says that like it does) then this week is the "unofficial" start of Father's Day films, I've already counted "Fear" as a very father-centric film, this looks like it will be the second, and there are more to come. 

Mark Wahlberg carries over again from "Shooter" and that makes six films in a row, that puts him on top of the leader board for the year, but if I stick to the plan he'll be passed by Kevin Hart really soon. 

I'll all for conserving my efforts right about now, I did look up those new documentaries about the Beach Boys and the Rolling Stones, and they should slot right in between docs I already have on the schedule, so I won't have to tear down the chain I made and re-build it, and then while I was on Hulu looking up that Stones doc I saw there was one there about Joan Baez, and what the hell, I looked at the cast list and I found a place for that one, too.  But NO MORE changes after that, because if I could just stop looking up more movies, I can stay on the current course and cruise all the way to the end of July, past Father's Day, past Independence Day, and then the doc block, I don't have to program anything until August 1 is approaching, and by then I might already be thinking about how to get to...horror movies?  Maybe not, I'll think about how to get to some back-to-school films and then hopefully a path to October will be easier to see from there. 

THE PLOT: When a stay-at-home dad who dedicates all his time to his children is persuaded to take time off for himself, he gets mixed up in the wild shenanigans of his childhood friend who's celebrating his 44th birthday. 

AFTER: I guess Dwayne Johnson wasn't available for this one, so Kevin Hart had to find a new muscled man to play the role of his character's best friend.  It's fine, the top movie stars are more or less interchangeable, anyway, I mean, does it really matter which A-list celebrity you pair the funny man with?  You can put Danny DeVito up against anybody, from Michael Douglas to Arnold Schwarzenegger, and he's still going to be funny, right?  

The hook here is that these two guys used to be best friends, but they grew up and became two very different people, one the responsible family man and the other one is still partying hard into his 40's, and there was a birthday-based skydiving incident that was just too much for Sonny to handle, so he stopped going to Huck's increasingly wilder and wilder annual destination celebrations.  Sonny is now a house-husband, or stay-at-home dad, or whatever you want to call the primary caregiver for two kids if that person is a male.  This is very modern and forward, of course, because some moms work and earn more money than their husbands could, so in those instances it makes perfect sense for Dad to take a few years off from his job, or find a lesser job that he can do from home, if he's the one who gets the kids ready for school in the morning and makes sure they do their homework at night, while Mom works late sometimes.  But then of course Mom might feel she's somehow less-than if she's not spending as much time with her kids, or if she's not exhibiting those skills that we've come to accept as "motherly".  But really, we're all working on this to some degree, trying to get beyond the old gender-based stereotypes, there's no reason why a Dad can't cook breakfast, go to PTA meetings, get snacks for soccer practice, and volunteer to run the auditions for the school talent show.  All of those things are important to the kids, even if there's no salary involved. 

But when Sonny's wife decides to take her kids to re-connect with them at her parents' house, it's also an opportunity to show that she CAN take care of them for a few days, while Sonny relaxes at home by himself for the first time in years.  However, after a few days he's very bored, and attempts to fill the hours with activities like golfing and eating BBQ turn out to be disastrous, and all of his friends who are parents at his kids' school are either busy or have terrible ideas for how he should spend his time, so he decides to go visit his old friend Huck on one of his wild birthday trip-parties.  (What could POSSIBLY go wrong?)

Well, just about everything that the writers could imagine, of course.  When Sonny joins the group of Huck's friends and co-workers, they start with some public skinny dipping, then all change into identical track suits and board a bus.  Uh-oh, this is all starting to feel rather cult-like, so this trip might end with everyone drinking poisoned Kool-Aid and waiting for the UFO to come out from behind the comet and pick them up.  OK, so it's not that kind of party.  Instead the bus takes them all to the desert where "Huck-a-palooza" is taking place, unfortunately it's not a concert but just a compound where they have to share yurts, forage for their own food and go to the bathroom in what are essentially buckets.  I guess there's a certain type of person who appreciates this sort of roughing-it experience, but really, nobody wants to hang out with those people.

After Sonny has an encounter with an incredibly fake-looking CGI mountain lion, he gains the respect of the other campers, but the revelry is cut short when a loan shark arrives with his female enforcer (how very progressive), demanding the $47,000 that Huck owes them.  And if you're wondering who would spend so much money on a desert birthday retreat when he owes someone so much money, well, that's irresponsible Huck for you.  Sonny, meanwhile, learns that his wife has been visited by her client, Armando, while she's on holiday,  and he starts to get jealous, like why didn't his wife mention that her rich male client would be there, and is that why she didn't want her husband to come along?  

Sonny and Huck are forced to move the party, once the loan shark burns down the campground.  The party bus heads to Sonny's house, where Huck's friends start mingling with Sonny's PTA friends, and meanwhile Sonny and Huck go to Armando's house and pull some stupid pranks at his house, like sticking spatulas down their pants and stealing all of his left shoes. Then they accidentally injure his giant tortoise on their way out.  

What's weird here is that there are so many details offered that were unnecessary - why is the amount owed the loan shark $47,000 and not an even $50K?  Why does this rich guy want to buy an island for tortoises, and not some other animal?  What was up with the track suits, that little detail tells us nothing about Huck's character, but it does make things easy for the film's wardrobe department, so was this just a case of the story following some kind of budgetary restraint?  I'm left scratching my head about so many things here. 

Similarly, there are way too many specific details about very minor characters - did the screenwriter think that would make the film feel more "real"?  It had the opposite effect.  The one parent who leaves his family at Legoland so he can come back and party with Sonny by crushing up and snorting his kid's ADHD medication - that's a very unique combination of things, but it doesn't add up to comedy per se, it's still just a random collection of things that happen to this one guy.  And the WHOLE movie is like this, in one form or another.  Why is there a Lego Death Star?  Why do they delete episodes of "Blue Bloods" from Armando's DVR?  Why does Sonny's son specifically watch "Eddie Murphy: Raw"?  Perhaps there are reasons for all of these things, but perhaps not, it's tough to say.  

I think, though, that the more the script focused on these specifics, the less time that left to be funny, if that's possible. Most viewers probably won't find humor in the name-checking of shows like "Storage Wars" or "Naked & Afraid", because those are just cultural references, not punchlines.  "Oh, they're talking about a show I know" is a poor substitute for laughing at jokes, just saying. 

Directed by John Hamburg (director of "Along Came Polly" and "I Love You, Man")

Also starring Kevin Hart (last seen in "Think Like a Man Too"), Regina Hall (ditto), Jimmy O. Yang (last seen in "80 for Brady"), Luis Gerardo Mendez (last seen in "Chariie's Angels" (2019)), Che Tafari, Amentii Sledge, Diane Delano (last seen in "Jeepers Creepers 2"), Andrew Santino (last seen in "Friendsgiving"), John Amos (last seen in "Norman Lear: Just Another Version of You"), Anna Maria Horsford (last seen in "Heartburn"), Shira Gross, Kavya Thakrar, Michelle DeShon, Sharon Gardner, Kieran Roberts, Shyaam Karra (last seen in "The Host"), Connie Chen (last seen in "American Psycho"), Naomi Ekperigin, Drew Droege (last seen in "The Circle"), Deborah S. Craig, Antione Grant, Manika Beverly, Oren Skoog, Alexis Rhee (last seen in "Because I Said So"), Cathy Chang, Tani Hala, Koji Niiya, Octavio Solorio, Carlos Javier Rivera, Tahj Mowry, Prisca Kim, Carlo Rota (last seen in "The Boondock Saints"), Melanie Minichino, Jameelah, Chau Long, Syd Skidmore, Thomas Ochoa, Kamilah Michelle Hatcher, Ilia Isorelys Paulino, Kayden Alexander Koshelev, James Chan, Amanda Barlow, Michael Krause, Dreyson Ford with a cameo from Seal (last seen in "Jagged"). 

RATING: 4 out of 10 reasons to admire George Clooney