Michael Keaton plays Ray Kroc, a failure in his fifties who still has dreams of hitting it big. We open up with Ray giving a sales pitch for a shake machine. We then watch as everyone he pitches slams the door in his face. Then he hears about a small hamburger stand that ordered six of the shake machines. This leads him to McDonald’s, a small, but very well run restaurant in California. Ray is amazed by the crowds and the speed of food delivery. The McDonald brothers take Ray on a tour and show him exactly how they run…
Author: Jon Herrera
Writer, Photographer, Blogger.
Back of the House
Scott Haas hangs around chef Tony Maws restuarant Craigie on Main and watches the great chef and his team work. Tony is a chef and an asshole-of course, that’s a bit redundant. Anyone who has watched Hell’s Kitchen is familiar with the foul mouthed antics of Gordon Rasmey and one of my personal heroes for lo these many years has been Anthony Bourdian. Neither man seems to suffer fools easily. So Tony is the self centered, I’m Right, You’re Wrong demi-god of his tiny little world. There are times when Scott shows one of the revolving cast of line cooks…
Colony
In 1992 there was a silly little movie called The Gun in Betty Lou’s Handbag. It was a bit of fluff about a librarian that gets into trouble. Somewhere near the end there is a scene of the bad guy having dinner with a man and his wife. He offers the wife a bit of food on the end of a knife. She take the food into her mouth nervously-and then the bad guy scrapes the blade across her teeth and slices through her cheek. This was one of the most shocking bits of violence I have ever seen in…
La La Land
I grew up watching Musicals. Singing in The Rain, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, and My Fair Lady were regular viewing fare. There were plenty of bad musicals as well. Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and The Little Prince didn’t quite measure up for me. The last Musical that I really loved with Julia Andrew’s Victor/Victoria, and it was more of a modern twist on the musical, since all of it’s songs were preformed on a stange, as opposed to everyone just breaking into song for no reason. La La Land opens with a song and dance number on one of…
Manchester by the Sea
Casey Affleck has won all kinds of awards for playing the role of Lee Chandler. This was the main reason I decided to watch Manchester by the Sea. As is often the case when I go into a movie expecting to see something great, I was a bit disappointed. Our hero, such as he is, is lonely loser who has a crappy job as a maintenance man. He lives in the tiny basement apartment that comes with job and has no patience for the people who bitch and moan about life as he tries to repair whatever needs to be…
Rogue One
Many Bothans died to bring us this information. Many years ago, when computers were first used in films, someone predicted that one day there would be digital Marilyn Monroes and digital James Deans. But what, he asked, if the CGI actors couldn’t act? We find out the answer in Rogue One, where several characters from Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, and The Return of the Jedi make cameo appearances. The most jarring of these was a stiff and emotionless Peter Cushing composite playing Grand Moff Tarkin. It was very good, but still not perfect. Of course, it is only…
Annual Dallas Cowboys Rant
“A little too much time on the clock,” Rodgers said of the 35 seconds Dallas left him. So, what’s worse? A team of complete losers that goes 4-12 and has no chance at all of returning to the Glory Days when the Dallas Cowboys won the Super Bowl on a regular basis? Or a team of posers that go 13-3 only to crash and burn like every other Dallas Cowboys team of the past twenty years or so? The local sports media are still high from the past season. The loss to the Green Bay Packers viewed as a mere…
Travelers
Kind of Invasion of the Body Snatchers meets The Terminator. We start off by watching someone die as a clock counts down their death. They fall down and die, only to come back to life as the clock starts counting up again. As in the brillant and far too short lived Brain Dead, the aliens who take over the bodies continue to pretend they are the bodies they are wearing. Our Cell is made up of five Travelers from the future who, like Kyle Reese, want to save the future. They have cool future tech and of course know things…
The O.A.
Spoilers In eight episodes we follow the adventures of a woman who may or may not be crazy. Who may or may not have been held captive for seven years. May or may not have died countless times. It has something to do with a bit of really bad Air Bending or maybe some Tai Chi performed by people who never really saw it performed properly. The show opens up with a woman jumping off a bridge. When asked why, she says she was trying to get back to her friends. We never find out how she survived this jump…
I’m Thinking of Ending Things
Iain Reid’s novel is short. A couple of hundred pages. The story is broken up into small bits. A snippet of a love story. A bit of a horror tale. A little mystery. What is the meaning of the title? What things are they thinking of ending? Who is thinking this? I’m thinking of ending things is a highly stylized book. It reminded me a bit of Flowers for Algernon. It’s not quite as good as Flowers for Algernon. Few stories are. The stylistic tick here. Is the use of short sentences. Sometimes. Very. Short. Sentences. A little of this…