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. 

The first 20 minutes of this are iconic. The vast majority of the rest of the film involve Charles Durning running, which he really isn’t in the shape for, after a psychopath. The end does tie everything up at the end, so it’s not an entire loss. Carol Kane is engaging as the babysitter; it generally surprises me when I see her in a non-comedic role. 

Since watching the Whoopi Goldberg’s Moms Mabley documentary, I’ve been trying to watch her few film appearances. Sadly the quality of the version on Hoopla is extremely poor, but was watchable enough. The story is not anything new for the 1930s-40s, a group of performers have to put on a show to save the boardinghouse, but it does offer the chance to see Moms and other acts of the time in action. I did chuckle at the little twist at the end.