I think this is just how it is, and filmmakers are surely aware of this. You can’t run a great first couple of laps and then get winded and ultimately stumble over the finish line and expect that everyone will react primarily to the first couple of laps. This cuts both ways, where people become a lot more forgiving about movies that take forever to get going if their viewing experience ultimately went out on a high note.
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Rebel Ridge (2024)
Agree somewhat with others here that the second half is not as good but I still think it’s pretty great overall. I thought it was pretty tense and has some great twists and turns.
Loved the non-lethal angle.
Grade: B
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The Dark Tower (2017)
I heard this was bad, but holy crap this was terrible. The movie has forgotten the face of its father. It’s a real shame, because the cast was inspired, but it’s all they can do to make the movie watchable. They try to condense a mountain of books into 90 minutes. Even the gunfighting scenes are not good.
Here’s hoping next time someone uses a mountain of cash to turn the Dark Tower into a multi season prestige tv series.
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Empire of the Dark (1991): Cinematic masterpiece. Uncompromising. 10/10.
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Flannagan has a TV series in development right now (pre-production at this point)
Absolutely the right person to tackle it. Its probably 2-3 year out at the earliest but im fucking stoked.
The movie is so bad that the common joke on SK reddit is “wait, there was a Dark Tower movie? Im pretty sure thats just a collective fever dream.,”
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That’s perfect. I hope it goes through production and gets at least a single season.
Do you know if they expect a new cast? As much as I like Idris Elba, I don’t know how they could give a fair adaptation of book two if Susannah isn’t able to accuse Roland of racism.
Where did you watch this? Steve Barkett did another vanity project called The Aftermath that absolutely has to be seen to believed. It’s on Freevee.
I’m very interested in Empire of the Dark
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Yeah, it will be fully recast. No word yet on who they expect the leads to be
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The Cincinnati Kid (1965)
This movie has its clear flaws: ham-fisted foreshadowing right from the start, a femme fatale who is simply too unrealistic of a mustache-twirler to seem like an actual person, and an ending that zags from expectation in a way that probably hurts the movie more than it helps are tops on my list.
But ultimately, the fun positives of the movie win the day. Our protagonist, played by Steve McQueen, oozes charisma. The poker scenes are not only enjoyable, but importantly to me as a poker connoisseur, are less stupid than most movie poker that you’ll find. The movie features a great Seinfeld character actor (Karl Malden) in a key supporting role. The central tension that pushes the plot along is ultimately compelling even if I concede that it doesn’t hold up incredibly well to close scrutiny. And, well, it would be performative of me to simply note the flaws of Ann-Margret’s character without acknowledging that I enjoyed watching her character’s part in the movie anyway.
I’m going to have to keep thinking on the ending. But even as someone who usually likes darker endings that subvert the “happily ever after” expectation, I struggled to accept it as the right choice here. Even so, the fact that it’s going to leave me thinking about it is a positive in and of itself.
Recommended viewing. 3.5/5. It’s on Tubi right now.
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Literally my reaction just now. But king has the widest bandwidth of quality with his works being made into movie and tv. Best of best and worst of worst. King is not protective of his licensing, which I appreciate.
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Awesome. Been meaning to watch this again.
The poker is so good. I wish all movies would write the gambling for players, not people who have never heard of the game and think a bad beat is just one person outplaying the other.
I think he sells the film rights for $1. If you’ve got a buck, he’ll give you a shot.
I basically had just two complaints:
- Announcing “no string bets” and then doing a whole bunch of string bets that had no consequence or even comment. Like, what? I wouldn’t have probably blinked if not for the announcement that such things were strictly prohibited. The setting being home games would otherwise allow me to give a fair amount of latitude on rule enforcement.
-
Following the usual trope of having completely absurd hands decide things at the end. Five-card stud results in full house vs. royal flush? Gimme a break.
And yet that’s still maybe a record low number of poker nitpicks for a movie with a lot of poker in it. Do you like the ending?
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I like it for what it is, but I don’t like the hands that end the game. It’s such a massive bad beat that you can’t really say he outplayed the Kid. I compare it to an early scene where the Kid calls down with 8s because he thinks the guy is trying to buy the pot with 6s. Or another scene where Howard wins with Q high vs J high. Now that’s some poker.
It seems like a pretty obvious hole that they never address why the person trying to fix the game never so much as attempted to lean on the backup dealer also. She was 100% going to be dealing some of the hands; she was explicitly there to cover breaks for Mr. Wilhelm.
But again I’m picking nits on something I definitely enjoyed.
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That’s a good point. I found this speculation on Reddit:
The movie really doesn’t make any overt allusion to it, but the circumstances of this hand make me think that “Ladyfingers” was cheating and setting the deck for Lacey.
Every other poker hand shown through the whole film is just “standard” 5 card stud stuff like 2-pair hands and trips winning the big pots, and Lacey is shown to play a solid strategy. Then here he raises 3rd with QJ8 suited? And hits perfect-perfect while The Kid makes a full…its just so wildly out of place.
This is like the Robbie J4 hand on steroids. You could play heads-up stud 10hrs a day for a hundred years and probably not ever see a cooler of this magnitude.
Its a good poker movie, but I also think the subtext that’s often missed is that basically everyone but The Kid is corrupt and that’s why he’ll never be “the man”.
Can’t say I would love that explanation since it would essentially indicate that Lacey bought off the backup dealer but not the primary.
It’s not impossible, but I don’t buy it. The defense I could make of the insane cooler is that it’s one of the easiest ways to set up a hand that could actually get enough money into the middle to break the Kid without making him lose on a fundamental misread, and they have to get really obvious about the monster vs. monster aspect in a mainstream movie.
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Unrelated, but I just recently learned this bit about Brody. If true, not cool of SNL to throw him under the bus like that.
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I didn’t know about that 
The only reason I don’t like Brody is because when he won an Oscar, he grabbed and kissed Halle Berry without her consent. Chill out Adrian.
Berry: “It was absolutely not planned. I didn’t know what the fuck was going on. I pretty much had to disassociate and get through the situation.”
Interviewer: “HAHAHA that is awesome! So how was the kiss?”
Berry: “I don’t know man, I was really just trying to figure out what the fuck was going on.”
Interviewer: “HAHAHA!”
The tone-deafness is off the charts.
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