Atari: Game Over

Were there really millions of Atari 2600 E.T. cartridges buried in a New Mexico landfill? This documentary seeks to answer that question. It also brings together the guy who developed E.T. (Howard Warshaw) and a few execs from Atari. So we kind of weave together three stories - the rise & fall of Atari, the career of Warshaw (the only dev at Atari whose every game was a million seller), and the search for the cartridges. And the movie succeeds on all three fronts. The story is well told, it's coherent, it's detailed enough, and the parties are all interesting. And the stuff with the landfill is very interesting. This is a terrific documentary, the best video game doc I've seen in awhile. 9/10.

Occupy Unmasked

Documentary claiming to expose the true origins of the Occupy Wall Street movement that seemed to rise out of nowhere back in 2011. And, to some degree, it succeeds in that regard. There's some rather damning video and email information shown detailing how the media helped to, well, create the movement. Unfortunately, that kind of hard-hitting actual investigative stuff is a small portion of the movie. The rest of the movie is more of a Breitbart and Brandon Darby hit piece akin to Jay Leno's "Jaywalking" segments where they show Occupy protesters that are clueless to the movement itself. They also spend a fair amount of time talking about rapes & sexual assaults at the various Occupy sites. And then there's a long diversion into a tangent somehow trying to link murders of Cambodians post-Vietnam to the Occupy movement that is just truly bizarre. Mostly, though, the movie is a lot of Breitbart ranting intermixed with clips of Occupy protesters swearing at cops or looting. In the end, this is not really a quality documentary but there IS some good stuff to be seen here. It's just lost in a mess of other nonsense. 4/10.

Bloodline

Coach Taylor (Kyle Chandler) is John Rayburn, the #1 (but not oldest) son of the Rayburn clan. Linda "Good God, I was annoying on ER" Cardellini is Meg, his sister. They have two brothers, Danny and Kevin. The show is set in south Florida, with the Rayburns being the wealthy owners of some kind of resort hotel down there. On the surface, they're the All-American family. But things are not quite what they seem. "We're not bad people. We just did a bad thing", John says. And the show spends just about all of the 13 episodes of season 1 getting around to that bad thing. This is a reaaaaaaaaaaallllly slooooooooow burn of a show. Lots and lots and lots of build. Lots of hint at past issues in the family that are sloooooowly revealed. Lots of meaningful glances, sentences with double meanings and so on. That's mixed with a sometimes confusing structure that mixes dreams, flashbacks, looks forward, and so on in a way that sometimes isn't real clear. And all of that adds up to a show that might just lose a lot of its audience along the way. The pacing is pretty glacial but it does pay off eventually (you can argue whether that payoff is worth it or not). The cast, which also includes Sissy Spacek as the Rayburn mom and MTV alum Jacinda Barrett as John's wife, is stellar. I was entertained but this isn't quite the home run I'd hoped for. And the big reveal at the end of season 1 to set up season 2 was pretty laughably obvious, which was a letdown. Still, I liked it and I want another season. 7/10.

From the Rough

I'm a sucker for "based on a true story" sports movies. Love 'em. This one tells the story of Catana Starks, the first black woman to be the head coach of a men's college golf team. Starks was the head coach at Tennessee State University. And in those last two sentences I have captured literally everything the movie gets factually correct about this story - Starks's name, her school, and her historical significance. It gets EVERYTHING ELSE COMPLETELY WRONG. I don't know that I've ever seen a "based on a true story" sports movie miss so many other details before. They shift the time from 1980 to present day. They change ALL the people. They make up schools. They Starks getting static for "failing" after ONE WEEK ON THE JOB. They have TSU winning a national title in their first season. And you know what? None of that would matter if the movie itself were any good. It's not. It's terrible. The golfers are a mishmash of stereotypes and caricatures. The storylines are cliched to the max. The dialogue is just awful and was clearly written by somebody who knew nothing about golf ("when I'm a golf player" being one egregiously bad example). The acting is terrible. The golf scenes are terrible - in one, a guy strikes his putt and it's clearly at least a foot to the right of his line and then they cut to the ball rolling straight in. Ugh. So, yeah, this sucked. 1/10.

Mirage Men

What if a lot of UFO hoaxes and "coverups" were actually disinformation spread by the government itself? This movie sort of tells the story of Richard Doty. Doty was apparently an Air Force guy who was involved with one Paul Bennewitz. Bennewitz lived near an Air Force base in the 1970s and noticed some strange stuff - stuff he thought were UFOs. He started filming things and contacted the Air Force. Doty was assigned to feed disinformation to Bennewitz and apparently somehow convinced him that aliens were invading. Or something. And Doty's actions apparently drove Bennewitz crazy and ruined his life. And this movie covers some of that. And there's maybe a good story to be told there. But it's structured in such a terrible, confusing fashion that you'll have no idea what's being talked about most of the time. And so much of what's being talked about is such obvious nonsense (Doty actually claims to have seen a film of "a live alien sitting and talking") that the film loses all credibility. If you want a movie that shows the UFO crowd to be a bunch of crackpots and lunatics, this one does the trick. I was hoping for more than that. Not a LOT more than that but wanted a little something. 1/10.

Houdini

Man, what a mess this was. I can't even imagine the discussions that went into writing this. "OK guys, we're gonna do a mini-series on Harry Houdini, one of the most amazing and fascinating characters of the early 20th century. He lived an incredible life, was world famous, STILL is world famous, and did all kinds of remarkable stuff. But forget all that. LET'S JUST MAKE STUFF UP INSTEAD!" Good grief. Adrien Brody is Harry Houdini, the world-renowned magician and escape artist of the early 20th century. And he does a tremendous job of looking the part. He is in incredible shape - kudos to him. But...man. They mangle just about every detail of his life, altering stuff for no apparent reason (having Houdini jump off a bridge into icy water for his famous escape instead of being inside a crate as actually happened), or just making stuff up (putting Houdini into an affair he never had, making his wife a pothead, and so on). I suppose it's appropriate this was done by The History Channel - they long ago abandoned their dedication to actual history and truth, so this fits right in. What a joke. 3/10.