A bunch of blurbs I wrote after I thought I was done
8 months ago
– Tue, Aug 12, 2025 at 05:16:38 PM
Found Footage: The Making of the Patterson Project (2025) Recommended
The Blair Witch Project parodies proliferated in the aftermath of the fright flick’s massive success in 1999. Independent filmmakers deluded themselves into thinking that spoofing The Blair Witch Project would be cheap and easy when it’s difficult to make a funny movie, no matter the budget.
The clever 2025 mockumentary Found Footage: The Making of the Patterson Project benefits from the twenty-six years separating it from The Blair Witch Project. It’s the antithesis of a quickie cash-in.
Mustachioed charmer Brennan Keel Cook stars as a neophyte director, making a movie exactly like The Blair Witch Project but with Bigfoot. The production is troubled by the start from quirky variables, such as a doddering biddy who helps fund the film out of a delusional belief that it will star her favorite actor, Alan Rickman. Unfortunately for her, he was too expensive and dead to play the lead.
Found Footage has an infectious “Let’s put on a show” spirit and a likable, relaxed vibe. In its third act, Found Footage takes a sharp turn into Location Horror, a subgenre in which the cast and crew of a terror tale encounter genuine evil while filming. Found Footage is more satisfying as satire than horror, but it’s the rare Blair Witch Project riff that justifies its existence. It took some time, but someone finally figured out how to successfully take on one of the biggest targets in pop culture.
Good Times (1967)
William Friedkin’s 1967 directorial debut, Good Times, presented a formidable challenge. The director made a musical whose success was dependent on the charm and appeal of his lilliputian leading man, Sonny Bono.
The ironically named Good Times was dishonestly sold as a Sonny and Cher movie because no one wanted a Sonny Bono solo vehicle. Cher, Sonny’s more charismatic partner, looks as if she’s trying to back out of the movie slowly, like Homer Simpson disappearing into a hedge, but failed.
The ugly bastard child of The Monkees and A Hard Day’s Night casts Sonny and Cher as themselves, married pop stars with a beauty-and-the-beast dynamic.
George Sanders plays a film executive who wants to make a movie starring Sonny and Cher in ten days. As Bono contemplates potential cinematic endeavors, his fantasies unfold as variety show-style vignettes.
Sonny glumly stumbles his way through riffs on Tarzan, detective movies, and Westerns, pausing regularly for music video-style sequences with Cher.
Friedkin and Bono reportedly wrote much of the screenplay without credit. Good Times is chockablock with the fun and frivolity you’d expect from the goofball behind The Exorcist, The French Connection, Sorcerer, and Cruising.
This lethargic misfire gave its director and reluctant leading lady, if not its underwhelming leading man, nowhere to go but up.
Hollywood Boulevard (1936)
Four decades before Joe Dante and Allan Arkush dug deep into the Roger Corman catalog for their audacious 1976 dual directorial debut, Hollywood Boulevard, Robert Florey directed a misanthropic dark comedy with the same name.
Like Dante and Arkush’s instant cult classic, Hollywood Boulevard is a tawdry tale of sex, sleaze, sensationalism, and cynical exploitation. John Halliday stars as John Blakeford, an actor deep in a steep professional decline.
The desperate, drowning thespian is thrown a metaphorical life preserver from scandal rag publisher Jordan Winslow (C. Gordon Howe). The professional parasite pays the actor a fortune for serialized memoirs so sensationalized that they qualify as fiction. The salacious accounts of sexual conquests prove wildly popular. Our oblivious protagonist gets cast in a movie he doesn’t realize is secretly produced by Jordan.
A baby-faced Robert Cummings plays an effete dandy of a screenwriter who becomes romantically involved with John Blakeford’s daughter Patricia (Marsha Hunt). The romance leads to Patricia becoming a murder suspect despite the conspicuous absence of a dead body.
Hollywood Boulevard gets off to a crackling start as a cynical satire about overlapping forms of show-business desperation. It’s less compelling in a stiff, over-plotted third act that takes an unfortunate turn toward melodrama.
Jake Squared (2013)
In the perplexing 2013 post-modern comedy-drama Jake Squared, a miscast Elias Koteas plays Jake Stein, a neurotic Jewish filmmaker who hires actor Mike Vogel, playing a fictionalized version of himself, to portray him in a film-within-a-film. It's a move that would feel convoluted and confusing even if Koteas didn't also play the protagonist as a 50-year-old, 40-year-old, and 30-year-old, while another actor plays the teenage Jake. Unflattering headwear defines the obnoxious iterations of the protagonist. One wears a bandanna. Another rocks a fedora. One whiny, self-absorbed Jake would be too many. Five feels sadistic.
In Jake Squared, filmmaker-turned-real estate agent-turned-filmmaker Jake decides to make a movie about a party as a way of exploring his romantic history and figuring out why he ended up alone.
The past and present begin to blur as our unlikable anti-hero contemplates why he was never able to commit fully to the many beautiful women who were madly in love with him, most notably a best friend played by Virginia Madsen.
"With all the death and poverty and hate in the world, people enslaving and torturing each other, what the hell is the relevance of a self-indulgent piece of shit like this?" asks Jake pointedly in narration. The film offers multiple answers to that question, but they're all as unconvincing, unsatisfying, and unbecomingly self-absorbed as the film itself.
National Lampoon’s Barely Legal (2003)
Three years before the hollowed-out husk of the National Lampoonslapped its name on 2006’s National Lampoon’s Cattle Call, they lent their increasingly worthless imprimatur to 2003’s National Lampoon’s Barely Legal, a suspiciously similar direct-to-video cheapie.
Cattle Call followed three horny adult degenerates who pretend to be making a film as a way to trick attractive women into having sex with them. Barely Legal, meanwhile,is about three horny teenage degenerates who make a porn film as a way to trick attractive women into having sex with them.
Erik von Detten, Tony Denman, and Daniel Farber play high school virgins who decide to make a porn movie for and by virgins as a way of getting paid and laid.
The amateurs have no idea what they’re doing when it comes to moviemaking or sex. That somehow doesn’t keep their pornographic debut from becoming a massive success before it’s even finished.
National Lampoon’s Barely Legal’s smutty sexism is ultimately less offensive than its attempt to play this rancid premise for drama when the virgin played by von Detten, who looks like an Abercrombie & Fitch model, alienates his friends by shtupping a classmate played by a slumming Amy Smart.
Barely Legal shares with Cattle Call a plot and The National Lampoon’s degraded name, as well as an air of desperation and dearth of laughs.
National Lampoon's Cattle Call (2006)
Three sex criminals pretend to be casting for the independent movie Perfect For Me in National Lampoon's Cattle Call. The raunchy comedy hit streaming services at a time when the National Lampoon name engendered dread rather than anticipation.
Thomas Ian Nicholas, Diedrich Bader, and Andrew Katos play horny opportunists who hit upon a way of pursuing sex with beautiful, vulnerable beauties that is both unethical and illegal when they pretend to be working on a low-budget movie. Gorgeous women, including Chelsea Handler in her film debut, flock to the conniving trio and their bogus cinematic production before the ladies turn the tables on the creepy anti-heroes and enact revenge.
Cattle Call at least acknowledges that its protagonists are dangerous, destructive deviants rather than lovable rascals looking for romance. The rancid laugher attempts to be an equal opportunity offender, but adding prison rape jokes and the prospect of incarceration for the fellas just make this travesty more pointlessly offensive.
Stunt Men (2009)
Professional rivals Eligh Supreme (Marc Blucas) and Tank (Ross Paterson) compete for Stuntman of the Year in the 2009 comedy Stunt Men.
The underwhelming chuckle-fest staggers artlessly and laughlessly in the footsteps of Christopher Guest's improvised comedies. It pits kooky, deluded dreamers against each other in a loosely structured mockumentary with a cringe-inducing climax where dreams get realized but mostly shattered.
Stunt Men wastes energy and effort on multiple subplots involving Eligh's complicated family history that add nothing but time. Despite its title, Stunt Men does not deserve a place of pride in the pantheon of movies about professional daredevils because it's so generic and lacking in cultural specificity that it could just as easily be about porn stars.
Despite a tiny budget, writer-director Eric Amadio assembled a cast that includes Joel David Moore, Zachary Levi, Dominique Swain, Brandon Routh, Taylor Negron, and Lin Shaye. They add zero laughs apiece. Given the scant budget, the lack of dynamic action set-pieces is understandable, if regrettable. The screaming absence of stunts and comedy, on the other hand, is unforgivable.
They'll Love Me When I'm Dead (2018)
Recommended
Orson Welles and John Huston were so charismatic that it'd take tremendous effort to make a documentary about them that wasn't compelling.
2018’s They'll Love Me When I'm Dead chronicles one of the most fascinating chapters in Welles and Huston's extraordinary lives: the making and unmaking of the Citizen Kane director's would-be New Hollywood comeback film, The Other Side of the Wind, which cast Huston as a Welles-like maverick filmmaker.
The Other Side of the Wind obsessed its creator. He filmed it over a period of years around the world. It began with impressionist Rich Little playing a lead role based on Welles' protege Peter Bogdanovich. Little couldn't act, however. So Bogdanovich stepped in and essentially played himself.
They'll Love Me When I'm Dead has fascinating footage of Little miscast in a pivotal role in an ambitious art film. That's only one of many too-strange-for-fiction elements at play in this riveting exploration of a genius intent on creating something vital independent of a Hollywood establishment that never stopped breaking Welles' heart.
Welles emerges as a tragic figure of Shakespearean depth. He personifies inspiration and desperation as he unsuccessfully seeks money to complete his quixotic masterpiece. Neville's documentary, unsurprisingly, would make for a terrific double feature with The Other Side of the Wind, which shocked and delighted cinephiles when it was completed and released through Netflix decades after Welles died in 1985.
We Kill For Love (2023) Recommended
Daniel Penta, the director of the 2023 documentary We Kill For Love, has thought way too hard about a subject most wouldn’t think about at all: the meaning of 1990s direct-to-video erotic thrillers. It’s widely assumed that softcore romps have no meaning or purpose beyond assisting in onanism, but Penta’s loving deep dive makes a convincing argument that they have a cultural and aesthetic value beyond facilitating self-love.
The nearly three-hour-long documentary posits erotic thrillers as the disreputable bastard child of film noir and hardboiled fiction that flourished in a post-AIDS pop culture sphere where sex was seen as inherently dangerous.
Erotic thrillers shamelessly objectified their femme fatales and devilish divas, but they also explored female sexual desire in a manner that was unusual then and now. This deep dive into Cinemax fodder argues that what was seen as objectifying and exploitative had a furtively feminist undercurrent.
We Kill For Love combines the intellectual rigor of Thom Anderson’s Los Angeles Plays Itself with the dishiness and epic length of Crystal Lake Memories. This endlessly engaging deep dive inspires nostalgia for a subgenre that was objectively quite poor. It’s a surprisingly cerebral exploration of a style of movie that eschewed the intellect to focus on more lascivious matters.
