Month: August 2021

The Snoop Sisters may technically be considered a television show, but since I’d love for more people to be exposed to their delightfulness, I’m including them here. The series was included as one of the NBC Mystery Movie programs that included a number of mystery series such as Columbo and each ‘episode’ is over an hour long. The Snoop Sisters stars Helen Hayes and Mildred Natwick as a pair of elderly sisters, the former a prolific, mystery novelist and the latter a widow who wrote the dictation for the novels. Of course they are drawn into various stories of intrigue because of their mystery connection. The sisters are delightfully amusing and make the five films completely worth their time. The series also features the likes of Bernie Casey, Vincent Price, Alice Cooper, and Paulette Goddard in her last role.

There is nothing like portrayals of the 1980s obsession with the Cold War. This is a fun romp of a conspiracy thriller involving a plot, that includes members of both sides, to disrupt a disarmament agreement by assassinating the leader of the USSR. Gene Hackman is solid as the service member tasked with figuring out and bringing down the conspiracy. He’s assisted by the likes of Joanna Cassidy, Dennis Franz, and Pam Grier; the film could have benefited by giving Grier specifically more screen time. Tommy Lee Jones and John Heard add to the stellar cast as members of the conspiracy.

I had tried watching this a few years ago, but visually it just wasn’t doing it for me. It definitely feels less like a style choice to use iPhones than the production couldn’t afford better equipment and wouldn’t know what to do with it if they had. In my second attempt, it was still jarring, but I was able to stick around until the end. The story of two transgender sex workers in Los Angeles is an interesting one. I do wish less of it involved watching Kitana Kiki Rodriguez stomping from location to location. Mya Taylor’s scenes were much more compelling. While the final act was much more interesting than the rest of the film, I’m not sure the entirety was worth my time. I appreciated the bits, particularly the very last scene, that touched on the women’s friendship.

I had hopes at the beginning of this film, a semi-light action mixed with a bit of a natural disaster flick. For that, I can suspend quite a bit of disbelief, but this one requires too much suspension while not delivering enough of what I was hoping for. The good is Morgan Freeman and Christian Slater are as good as they can be. Ed Asner and Betty White are solid in their small roles. On the other hand, Minnie Driver doesn’t make sense in her role and is given very little to do with it. I’m fairly certain that Huntingburg, Indiana has never seen that much rain ever, let alone in a 24 hour period. Even in 1998, I’m not sure $3 million split amongst a few people was worth all the effort they put into this film. For the good guys, it’s dark and there’s a deluge of rain, I’m pretty sure you can hide away from the bad guys for a good long time in those circumstances. All this nonsense culminated with Jars of Clay’s Flood playing over the credits for some Lucifer knows why reason.