The Out-Laws (2023) - Movie Review

Dammit, I knew that getting lucky with Murder Mystery 2 being kind of decent wasn’t going to last. Although honestly, I have some morbid appreciation for this because I didn’t even think they made American comedies like this any more. Both here and for my FilmInk work, I find myself regularly bringing up how modern US comedies seem to spend a lot of time just ad-libbing and riffing instead of actually moving the plot forward or doing anything interesting with the characters. Nowadays, most filmmakers have gotten it into their heads that comedy can help advance a story instead of just grinding it to a halt for little to no reason, but there are some brave little soldiers who are doing their best to keep that style alive.

Lucky Day (2020) - Movie Review

Time for a step into genre weirdness as we look at what can only be described as the closest we’ll ever get to an ‘official’ Tarantino knock-off. Writer/director Roger Avary worked quite closely with Tarantino himself in the ‘90s, doing both credited and uncredited work on Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, and even Tarantino’s writer-only gigs with True Romance and Natural Born Killers. With Tarantino seemingly hitting the twilight of his career, given his latest felt like a loving goodbye letter to the medium he adores, I’d argue that there might be some use out of a production like this as a further testament to that legacy. But that’s not the result we get, though.