The Devil Wears Prada 2 - My Take (Spoilers)

 

Yes. I saw this the day before it officially opens because almost all movies with a Friday release date are in theaters the day before. I don't know why.

This sequel should have remained "in the works" because what they made isn't good.

The wit is as sharp as a butter knife, the movie is about 30 minutes too long, the original characters are now bargain basement caricatures of themselves, and there's thinly disguised characters who are supposed to be the Bezos. Very thinly disguised.

Andy (Anne Hathaway in one of the five movies she's in this year) is even more fumbling and clueless than she was twenty years ago. They work so hard to make her the heart of the movie that it overshoots into cringe territory.

Miranda (Meryl Streep) tries to be as acerbic as the first time around but seems more tired. They give her some character development and juicy lines but it's nothing new.

Nigel (Stanley Tucci) is the standout of this one, probably again. He's the heads-down, don't make waves same as he was before but has more of a resigned feeling, as he should after twenty years doing the same thing.

Emily (Emily Blunt) is kind of sidelined here and tries to recapture the bickering from the first one. As with the rest she didn't hit the mark.

This time around the problem is that the magazine has been trying to move into the digital era and is suffering because no one has an attention span anymore. Then the stakes rise when the owner passes away and his son wants to take things into a fresh, even more digital era. The film makes it very obvious that Miranda is old-school and, well, old so therefore her ways are bad.

Andy teams up with Emily to save the magazine from being sold, only to be double crossed because Emily's not-Bezo boyfriend is going to buy it in a secret deal so Emily can be the editor in chief. Miranda figured it all out, Andy is stunned by the obvious betrayal. One nice bit of writing has Miranda talking at Andy about betrayal and it's not actually directed at her. It was Miranda telling her she knew who was going to take the hit and who was going to do it.

Andy is back because she lost her job and was hired to be the features editor. She dug the magazine out of a scandal and then continues to desperately seek Miranda's approval. This sets up more of the same from the first movie - bitchy and/or overlooked assistants, fashion snobbery, elitism, etc. only this time it's kinda tired. It's also the cliche of the writer/editor wanting to put real journalism into a fashion magazine.

She even goes so far as to snag a coveted interview with not-Bezo's first wife, who Miranda considers the golden ring. Not-Bezo's first wife gives the interview, saying that she's going to give all the money away, etc. This does not get Andy the approval she seeks either.

Anyway.

Miranda kind of gave up when things took the hard spin but the situation with the magazine being pulled out from under her gives her a second wind. She gives Andy a list of phone numbers to call to do .. something. Andy pulls it off but they have to leave right before Miranda gives the keynote speech at their new Milan venue. Miranda has Nigel do it, realizing that he'd been wanting to advance for a long time.

Not-Bezo and Emily are lunching with the owner's son, touching on the final details of the sale. The son gets a phone call, talks financial stuff, then says the entire media branch has been sold so the magazine has been sold too.

Andy and Miranda drive and fly off, ending with a helicopter landing .. on the lawn of not-Bezo's first wife's house. She bought the media branch, ensuring that Miranda (and Andy) get to stay at their beloved magazine.

As in the first one there's a big montage of fashion designers and models, along with the magazine's fashion show. Pink gets a cameo here because they need to find music for the show and Miranda uses Nigel to kind of strong arm her into performing. She gets a full song out during the fashion show.

That's really it. There's nothing that stands out for this and it takes the shine off the original movie's impact. They push too hard on how things have changed (Miranda has a dedicated HR person to tell her when she's being politically incorrect) and not at all on how characters have changed over two decades.

Busboys - My Take (Spoilers)

 

I like David Spade, when he stays in his lane. So seeing a movie where the summary describes him as "an idiot" seems like it would fit that situation.

In short. David Spade and Theo Von were pretty good in a very bad script they wrote themselves.

Edit - After looking on IMDb I found out Theo Von has a comedy podcast. Now the rest of this makes more sense because it's another attempt at a social media personality trying to break into movies. Notice the word "trying".

The premise is that they're two perpetual underdogs who think being a waiter is the pinnacle of a career. They take jobs as busboys to work their way up to be waiters. The age difference is played out as being friends for close to two decades. Then it gets into the "trying too hard" aspect of the movie.

The second plot of them trying to do a drug deal to get money is where it gets, quite frankly, stupid. The attempts at satire regarding all the various alphabet government agencies and then how the DEA handles investigating things is terrible. The actual drug cartel/gang is terrible. They bypassed satire and moved directly into cringe.

Example - one of the alphabets that show up are a pair of well-proportioned women in bikinis with DTF hats and jackets. It was slightly amusing when they showed up for the second time and when asked why they were there they said they were in the group chat.

David and Theo really leaned into their roles and they work well together. The crew of misfits in the restaurant work well together, for the most part. It's just a terrible script that kept things from being a goofy romp.

The restaurant manager was way too close to a Chris Farley character for my liking. The role would have suited him and the actor bears a close resemblance. That made it seem like a cheap grab for the "Tommy Boy" vibe, for those who remember the way those two worked well in that movie.

I'm disappointed to see the potential they had wasted so badly.

Mother Mary - My Take (Spoilers)

 

I'm trying to remember why I wanted to see this movie and it's kind of a blank. I saw the trailer and it kinda looked interesting? I had movies left to see that week and wanted something new? The costumes in the trailer looked cool?

Anyway. I saw it.

It wasn't interesting. It was something I hadn't seen. The costumes were cool-ish. Notice I didn't say anything about the plot because I honestly have no idea what this movie was supposed to tell. I'm not being figurative here. I'm being literal.

Most of the movie is the two women yapping at each other in hostile passive aggressive stuff, weird metaphorical stuff, whiny stuff, and oddly paranormal stuff. There's flashbacks to what seems to be the events each of them experienced sharing their pain for each other? There's a metaphor in that pain being made into something beautiful?

There's a lot of Anne Hathaway in very small couture costumes. Couture in this case means the stuff on the runway that makes very little fashion sense. She sings. Her signature stage costume persona (Mother Mary) is a halo of some kind.

From what I can pick out of this the two of them were friends, maybe lovers, when MM's singing career started and the other woman was her costumer. She made the first halo, in an interesting punk style of long nails out of heavy leather. The two of them had a falling out, possibly when MM started looking at other designers for her costumes.

She's back begging for a costume from the woman, who now has a successful fashion line, because nothing anyone else does feels like it expresses who she is. I think that's the reason. Anyway. This is when the yapping happens.

The paranormal is in the form of some kind of red ghost that looks like fabric floating. It left the designer woman and went to the singer, where it currently resides. They reconcile when the designer sets a chalk circle and they have some kind of ritual to let the red ghost out of the singer. There's the mandatory lesbian sex metaphor in there as well.

The designer makes a dress out of the red ghost made material as - heh heh - red material. It's another lesbian metaphor and oddly enough the singer doesn't wear it. She goes with a concept the designer had at the beginning of entering from the lobby and tearing off her costume as she goes to the stage to show her true self.

Maybe I did get some meaning out of the thing at all but honestly it was a mess. Too much metaphor, not enough substance to hold it up.

Hokum - My Take (Spoilers)

 

This was a Scream Unseen and one I was interested in as well. I consider those a double header since I get a surprise movie and one I wanted to see for one price.

This will be a short review. This is not a good sign for how much I enjoy a movie.

We've got the moody writer. We've got the dead parents. We've got the moody writer going to Ireland to scatter their ashes. We've got his feelings towards his parents shown, quite well, by how he carefully places his mother's ashes by a tree in a picture from their honeymoon and then throwing his father's ashes off into the woods.

The moody, nihilistic writer is an absolute ass to everyone in the hotel he's staying at - the same one his parents honeymooned at. There's an attempt at foreshadowing that falls flat because the Irish accent is too thick to easily understand and the story is broken up into segments so you lose track.

There's the convenient honeymoon suite that's forever locked.

So we get a movie full of jump scares and not much else. There's no actual reason for the things that happen. The writer gets a redemption arc he doesn't deserve.

The one smart thing that happened in this movie is that the writer was desperate enough to try making a chalk circle, after initially dismissing it as superstition. He gets the chalk in a believable way too.

I was hoping that this would be a horror movie set with Irish folklore, which would be a pleasant change from the generic stuff and the American focused stuff. Instead we get shown a book cover twice about Irish folklore and a generic horror movie.

The ending makes no sense. Quite literally there's nothing that gives you any idea why things happen in the finale. Maybe that story that I didn't understand at the beginning helped? I don't know.

Anyway. If you like jump scares then this is the movie for you.

Over Your Dead Body - My Take (Spoilers)

 

I'd wanted to see this one since I saw the trailers. It looked .. interesting enough to amuse me. Most of the time that's all I want from a movie.

The trailer showed a married couple who go away to a lakefront cabin, with the intention of killing each other. It doesn't say why. It kind of shows how. It does what a trailer should - it catches your interest. So I went in expecting that sort of thing.

What I got was a movie that starts with what's in the trailer, but more. There's non-linear storytelling but they do it right by keeping it short. By showing different viewpoints things start to gain a wider perspective.

The reason they're trying to kill each other is for insurance money. The husband quit his job to make a go of his film career, after a minor success directing a movie. He's now doing low-budget commercials with low-budget paychecks. She's a struggling actress, at his instigation, and is resentful he didn't cast her in the one movie he made. They're broke and neither one likes it.

At this point things that were happening in the beginning of the movie make more sense because they were each establishing their alibi.

They're making their moves at the cabin and find out what the other one is doing. When they're doing the classic "run through the house trying to get at each other" some people fall through the ceiling on them.

These are escaped convicts. The same ones that were on the news in the background while they were being nice to each other before trying to kill each other. OK then.

Without detailing it all there's now a situation where the married couple have to work together so they both stay alive. Of course they start off with offering the killers part of the insurance money if they kill the other spouse. Then it devolves into them trying to get away.

The escaped convicts have the female prison guard along. One of the killers is Timothy Oliphant so yeah, they play up how he seduced her for the sole reason of helping them escape. Then he has to keep pretending so she doesn't do anything to get them captured again.

I can't quite remember when it winds in but the husband has a scene with his father who owns the lakefront cabin and is in assisted care. He's a feisty old guy.

The movie leans heavy into gore. It works because the whole movie goes over-the-top so the over-the-top gore matches. It's oddly not very bloody, just gory. If that makes sense. Anyway.

The death toll is:

• Both escaped convicts
• The prison guard who helped them escape
• The feisty father

The couple then capitalizes on their experience. Talk shows and then a movie version, where the wife stars and he directs. The whole experience brought them together as a couple too. In a way it's a weirdly twisted love story. With lots of gore.

It was more entertaining than I expected, which is a pleasant surprise. It took me looking up the movie on IMDb to figure out that the husband is the actor who played Marshall in "How I Met Your Mother". I knew he was familiar but couldn't place him. The wife is the same actress in the "Ready or Not" movies so the poor woman is still getting blood splattered. Go figure.

Faces of Death (2026) - My Take (Spoilers)

 

This was yet another Scream Unseen so it's not something I had any intention of wasting one of my movie slots on, even if I had ones left over. I only knew it existed because there was a trailer for it at the previous Scream Unseen.

The concept here is that someone is taking scenes from the actual, original "Faces of Death" released in 1978 (thank you Wikipedia), recreating them, and posting them on social media. Since the movie had various and sundry "scenes" they translate well to the short video format used on YouTube, TikTok, etc.

The original movie was mostly fake with real footage from other sources, sometimes recreated for effect (thank you Wikipedia). I was of an age when I remember when this came out and yeah, it was a rite of passage in some respects. Mostly it was people going "ew" and watching other things. It wasn't nearly as pervasive as some try to make it. Of course it had its fan base but what gross movie doesn't?

The main character is a woman who's job is to review reported content on a social media site. It's obviously meant to be TikTok but that's to be expected. It shows her going through various and sundry videos, approving or denying based on content. Per policy she lets the gross and violent stuff through but has to remove the ones dealing with sex education. No heavy handed writing there. Nope.

They show her taking blue pills she keeps in a baggie in her pocket. It turns out she's got anxiety because her sister was killed while the two of them were filming what they wanted to be a viral video. They were on train tracks and trying to film themselves in front of the train until the very last minute. She got away, her sister slipped on the gravel and was under the train when it passed. The main character is recognized by people as Train Girl.

I let that one go. She's not in any way distinctive physically so there's no reason why people would continue to recognize her because of the short attention span these videos have. Unless maybe she's living in the same area and people know here that way? Didn't seem like it but I can assume.

When she sees a second one of the videos in the same format she gets concerned and talks to her supervisor/friend about it. She's reminded that it isn't her job to make the call, she needs to follow the rules, and that she's signed an NDA so she can't talk about it outside work. I would think potential murder trumps an NDA but what do I know?

The videos are just fake enough to make you question them. That's done well. There's a consistency in using red tape over the eyes of mannequins used in the shooting and also in the scenery. They show the comments pouring in on the videos as people debate if it's real or not and how much they enjoy the content.

We see the killer early on. He works at for a cellular phone company and uses admin access to dig into how to find an influencer he's obsessed with. She's actually a pretty harmless one as influencers go. Per her own content she just wanted to show makeup tips and then things got popular so now she feels that she needs to keep her followers happy. The killer tracks her down and kidnaps her.

The main character uses her roommates laptop because she's on an internet break. She does this to try to track down the creator of the potential snuff content. Using techniques that don't really exist she makes progress but wants/needs the original uploads to look at metadata. Yes. They use the buzzwords. She coerces her boss/friend out of the office while he's working overtime and uses his computer to copy over all the videos. She's still taking those blue pills and the movie makes a point of her tossing the bag on the desk instead of putting it in her pocket like she's done every other freaking time it's shown.

Long story short(er). She gets fired for the pills and because she can't let this situation go. She buys a laptop so she can do her own research because her roommate told her she was getting too involved and wouldn't let her use his anymore. She continues.

The killer kidnaps someone from a TV news station and his son, who happened to be home at the wrong time. They show the holding cages in the killer's basement with the influencer and the father-son duo. The father gets pulled out and used for the next video being shot. Literally.

I can't remember how the main character figures out who the killer is and where he lives. She tries talking to the police and gets brushed off. The killer sets up a honeytrap and gets the information on the main character so he can use her, killing her roommate in the process. She decides to go in on her own. Predictably she's caught and put into the empty cage. She uses a convenient self defense lipstick knife her roommate had to escape and she's able to get the influencer free to go with her. They break out while the killer hunts them but go out into the fenced back yard that has undeveloped land behind it.

The influencer gets shot (obviously no one in the subdivision cares about the sound of a high power rifle being fired repeatedly) and dragged back. The main character stays back to get evidence and snags the convenient external hard drive labeled FOD. When she runs away she gets away. The hospital finds ketamine in her system from when he knocked her out, the nurse lectures her, and gives her a bottle of Narcan.

The killer has brought the influencer back into the house and puts on his meek and mild clothing and persona when the main character brings the police over to check things out. He was smart enough to make his own 911 call about being stalked and describing the main character. The police believe him, the calm meek guy who said he's being stalked, over the almost hysterical main character saying there's dead bodies and people chained up in his basement. He was even clever enough to turn up the music so it drown out the sound of the still alive influencer moaning in the kitchen.

I'll wrap this up.

The main character goes back to have this out with the killer. On the Uber ride over there she's huffing the Narcan. She gets there, he drugs her again, and she goes with it. When she's in the filming room she pops up and they fight. She stabs him with the lipstick knife she brought in until she can get to other weapons. There's the mandatory "hide from the killer" scene. There's the mandatory extreme horror scene. There's a mandatory wrestle on the floor covered in blood. There's the mandatory bad guy monologue on how he's giving the people what they want. Surprise, she's wearing a button camera and has all of it on the memory card. As he's lying there, bleeding and cursing, she uploads it to social media.

End of movie.

I will say the concepts weren't bad. Using an old discredited horror/slasher/fake documentary as his inspiration the killer uses people's fascination with extreme content to kill people and get accolades. The prevalence of social media in young people's lives fuels this kind of thing, which isn't really wrong. It's more a commentary on that than on the killing itself, even though he uses prominent social media people as his victims.

What was bad was the story wrapping those concepts. Disbelief had to be stretched to the breaking point when it was the race between the killer and the main character, then the battle between the main character and the killer. Putting his confession on social media was a "cherry on top" kind of thing, since that's where he put his crimes.

She had to go back because the hard drive she took was hit with a bullet during her escape. There are ways to recover data, you know. The police can do that. But that wouldn't have worked with the plot.

This is also one of the increasingly popular non-endings that I'm seeing. Yes, the killer is seriously wounded and his confession is made public. But there's no conclusion. Just her sitting there covered in blood, laughing/crying that the upload finished and the comments start. Maybe they wanted to make the statement that the same public that adores you will turn on you in a heartbeat? I don't know.

The lipstick knife also bugs me. It's a pretty nice self-defense weapon. The top is real lipstick. Removed it's about an inch long curved blade. But it's not an attack weapon and wouldn't have caused near the damage they showed in the fight. It's like using a .22 gun for self-defense. It just pisses them off.

Project Hail Mary User Review Annoyances

 

Yes. I chose the annoyed guy meme as my cover image because he pretty much nails my expression when reading far too many user reviews of this movie. I read the reviews mostly to downvote people who bitch about things in the book that aren't in the movie, things in the movie that aren't in the book, and how the book and the movie are different in general.

THE BOOK IS NOT THE MOVIE. THE MOVIE IS NOT THE BOOK.

THE BOOK IS NOT THE MOVIE. THE MOVIE IS NOT THE BOOK.

THE BOOK IS NOT THE MOVIE. THE MOVIE IS NOT THE BOOK.

THE BOOK IS NOT THE MOVIE. THE MOVIE IS NOT THE BOOK.

THE BOOK IS NOT THE MOVIE. THE MOVIE IS NOT THE BOOK.

THE BOOK IS NOT THE MOVIE. THE MOVIE IS NOT THE BOOK.

THE BOOK IS NOT THE MOVIE. THE MOVIE IS NOT THE BOOK.

THE BOOK IS NOT THE MOVIE. THE MOVIE IS NOT THE BOOK.

THE BOOK IS NOT THE MOVIE. THE MOVIE IS NOT THE BOOK.

Have I made this clear enough yet? Because I can paste a hella lot more of that pair of sentences.

THE BOOK IS NOT THE MOVIE. THE MOVIE IS NOT THE BOOK.

One more for good measure.

Here's something people need to learn:

Adapt: to make suitable to requirements or conditions; adjust or modify fittingly.

The book and the movie are different mediums. The book needs to be ADAPTED to the medium of film. That doesn't mean copy-pasting the text into a screenplay. It would be much easier if that were the case. No. It means taking what's in the book and figuring out what the heck is going to play visually.

If you've read the book, which I do recommend, you'll find there's a crapton of science, a crapton of monologue, and a crapton of buildup to the mission itself. That buildup involves a crapton of people who make brief appearances. None of this is going to translate well into two and half hours of screen time.

I get it. People have opinions. That's why they write reviews. I'm perfectly fine with them writing them. I'm not perfectly fine with their opinions about how the book should have been adapted. None of them are screenwriters. None of them are directors. None of them have the slightest clue about how to adapt a novel to a screenplay. But darn it all if they present themselves as the high arbiters of what should be done.

I don't do that in my reviews. I think this is the only review I've done that even mentions the source material and even then I separated it out from the movie itself. That's because I understand that a book needs to be adapted to a movie.

There's people whining that they "dumbed down the science". If you've read an Andy Weir book you know you're going to be reading a science heavy book. A very science heavy book. It's easy to have your eyes glaze over at times as he goes through the science accurate processes needed to do what needs to be done. Imagine that on the big screen, taking up precious time. Do you really want to watch Grace incrementally increasing the percentage of nitrogen in the taumeba farms by 0.05% until they get to where they need to be? That's going from zero to over 3%. I'll let you do the math on how many iterations that is and how long it would be to show each one. The movie shows that he's doing it and then shows the labels on the breeder farm with percentages and success/fail. That's maybe two minutes of screentime but gets the entire concept across.

Then there's the outcry about the coma resistant gene being removed from the movie. Even Mr. Weir admitted it was a cheap way to deal with the plot progression. But it worked, in the book. There was no reason to put it in the movie because they handled the situation in another, more suitable for a movie way. Same result, different method.

I'm gonna keep going on some of these, let me tell you. Because I'm peeved and I have a blog.

The book has an entirely different time progression. It was years between when Grace was brought onto the project and the launch. Literally years. They had to build the ship and send it up in parts, to be assembled by people on the ISS. They had to do things like build the spin drive, which was not a done deal when it was shown in the book. Plus they didn't add the third side that was a squeegie for the dead astrophage for some reason but hey, seconds matter in a movie.

Grace did do EVA testing in the book. He tested various and sundry pieces of equipment and was versed in how things worked. Stratt had him involved in the project to the point where he was doing paperwork on the remaining things that could be brought onto the ship. It was stated that everyone on the project considered him Stratt's second in command. That's not something that happens in a few months, as the movie implied.

And then there's Rocky. Rocky did have a different "tone" in the book, no pun intended. Rocky was an experienced engineer and had his own wealth of wisdom. He was more somber, more focused, and at many times fed up with the far less somber and focused Grace. Although when science was on the line it was Grace who led the charge. When it was a more abstract problem Rocky was the one who could break it down, as engineers tend to do. They didn't take that all away from him but they certainly made him a less somber personality.

The ending difference really set some people off. Like, they got legitimately angry about the changes. They didn't see why those changes had to happen. They honestly did. In the book Rocky's planet has a much much higher gravity than Earth, and Grace suffers from living in it. He's arthritic, he's never really recovered from the nutrition deficiencies on the trip to Erid, and he's older. You simply can't do that with an attractive charismatic actor. It would be stupid. Instead they give Grace a home.

I will touch once and only once on the "meburger". No one in their right mind would have put cannibalism in this movie. Grace even says that's what it is but he's justified it as not really cannibalism because he's eating himself. If you haven't read the book, which I do recommend, his protein source is his own cloned muscle tissue, the process which the Eridians learned from the laptop and data he gave them. That bit of morbid humor stays in the book.

Another part of the ending that changed was the fate of Earth. In the book Rocky tells him that their scientists see that the sun is brighter. That's how Grace knows his message got back safely. It's a good line and says all that the scientist needs to hear. The movie, a more visual format, has the Earth team with the sample and his recordings. It closes the loop between him and Stratt. There's no closure like that in the book.

I will note something that I read online when people were debating the ending changes. By the time Grace finds out about the sun it's been at least twelve and probably a lot more years since it happened. We're never really told, or I don't remember, how long the trip from Tau Ceti to Erid took. Let's say twenty years. If Grace did decide to go back he would have been twenty years older, suffering from the gravity and nutritional effects, have to risk the coma again when he's less healthy, and there's a good chance everyone he knew would be dead. Staying on Erid isn't that difficult of a decision when those things are factored in. The movie has less time passing on Erid but still would send him home to an unknown world where he's generations behind whatever happened. His world is gone even if the planet survived.

Those are the bigger things that keep coming up in the user reviews, and that little one tossed in at the end that I like to think about. It's OK to like both the book and the movie for what they are. It's OK to like one but not the other. It's not OK to compare them and get whiny that they're different.

2026 is the year of "Project Hail Mary". People are going to be talking about it for a while because I don't see anything coming out this year that has the broad appeal of this one and has a good book behind it. It will be bouncing in and out of theaters during the year as well so people can go see it again on the big screen.

One last peeve then I'll stop.

There's an audiobook for this that people love. The first potential voice for Rocky in the movie is the voice actor from the audiobook, which I find amusing. But for the love of all that's holy do not tell people that they have to listen to it rather than read the book. Seriously. People are telling others to not read the book, listen to the audiobook. Not everyone wants to listen to books, you know. Some of them, including me, prefer the written word so we can put our own voices to the text. Recommend it all you like, but don't say one is better than the other. They can both be good, in their own ways.

One last last peeve and then I'll stop.

Because of the name there's a significant number of people who thought this was a religious movie or one that had religious overtones. It doesn't. The title doesn't refer to religion - it refers to an American football play. As soon as I see someone referencing Bible verses in their writeup I lose all respect for them and assume they don't know their ass from their elbow.