Have I talked about Eephus? Has anyone else seen it? I didn't know what I thought of it while I watched it, but it is a movie that just lingers. 

Baseball is the best sport to make movies about.

Generally regarded as one of if not the best of the recent spate of Nicaissance Cage films.  I found it to be more indicative of what I like least about these so-called comeback performances.  This isn't self-parody, necessarily (he's already accomplished an entire genre of that), but in all honesty the bulk of his performance here rests on the simple fact of being Nicolas Cage, albeit a more exhausted version, but with an unmistakably intense brood.  Cage simply has to look like himself, anguished and eccentric and vaguely confused, to establish his character, and the audience's preconceptions of Cage handles the rest.  That he's a hermit truffle-hunter on the hunt for his stolen pig also establishes a built-in pathos, and thankfully the film is sincere enough to avoid smirking camp, although this earnestness also makes the film a bit dismal.  But this isn't a bad film at all, even as a contrived revenge drama.  I just wouldn't consider it, as Cage does and many critics do, a career best.

7.5/10




The upside to writing and directing your own vanity comedy films is not only can you pay a couple of gorgeous actresses to be contractually obligated to find your schlubby hubby body sexually irresistble but you can also afford phallic prosthetics as well.  What you don't have to worry about, apparently, is bothering to write any jokes for your vanity comedy film.  Instead, you can rely on some (schlubby) slapstick and grabass, some sitcom-cutesy banter and one admittedly amusing homoerotic fistfight.  I guess that's enough in this economy.

6/10




This is one of those hysterically stupid scripts which must have been written with the "second screen" ethos in mind.  Either that or Ron Howard and his writer, Noah Pink, have just lost any remaining respect for their audiences.  Based on true events, allegedly, I have not seen but have no trouble recommending the documentary The Galapagos Affair: Satan Came to Eden instead.  (The fact they truncated that awesome subtitle is evidence of the total lack of imagination utilized here.)

There are nowhere nearly enough tsunamis in the Pacific Ocean to wash the stench of this putrid motion picture off of the servers of whichever forsaken streaming service it will be damned to fester.

1/10