We watch several movies a week. Every Friday, we'll talk a little about some of the movies we watched that we felt were Worth Mentioning.
DIRTY LAUNDRY (1987)
At 11pm on Saturday, December 31, 1988, legendary drive-in movie critic Joe Bob Briggs appeared on TV screens across the United States to present a showing of the 1987 comedy Dirty Laundry on the cable station The Movie Channel. Which means that, while a large portion of the country was out celebrating the new year, many American citizens got 1989 started by watching the last 25 minutes of Dirty Laundry – a movie that Joe Bob described as being “a real turkey ... so dumb, you don’t have to actually watch any of it, it’s just gonna be playing in your house while you mix cocktails.” I didn’t catch that ‘88 into ‘89 showing of Dirty Laundry (we didn’t even have The Movie Channel in my household at that time), but since Joe Bob hosted the movie I did end up watching it eventually... decades later, in 2025. And yes, I actually did watch and pay attention to it.
By the way, this would have been the image on the screen at the exact second when 1989 began, a shot of Edy Williams as a woman who has a lot of poodles:
Directed by William Webb, who crafted the script with Brad Munson, the movie gets started with a regular dude named Jay (Leigh McCloskey) putting on his headphones and heading out to get his clothes washed at the nearest laundromat, a place called The Washing Machine – where he wanders into the middle of a drug deal involving a pair of old ladies and a big bald guy named Vito (the great character actor Nicholas Worth) – who is connected to rocker Ricky Savoy (Johnny B. Frank), his manager Maurice (Sonny Bono, in a small role), and criminal kingpin 'Macho' Marty Benedictine (Frankie Valli). When a random arguing couple disrupts the peace, Jay leaves the laundromat with a bag he thinks contains his clothes... but since he and everybody else in the place is carrying their stuff in white burlap bags, he has grabbed the wrong bag. Now he has the million dollars from the drug deal.
It takes a surprisingly long time for Jay to realize he has the million dollars in his possession – and while we wait for him to take a look in his bag, we get cameo appearances from Greg Louganis and John Moschitta Jr., interactions with Robbie Rist as Jay’s dorky neighbor Oscar, some Dragnet and Miami Vice spoofs involving the authorities (plus a couple of guys who are called Betty and Veronica), and Jay meets fledgling reporter Trish (Jeanne O'Brien), who was supposed to interview Ricky Savoy but is more interested in covering the presence of 'Macho' Marty Benedictine at the Ricky Savoy concert, where Jay was operating the soundboard.
Despite its description as a turkey, I found Dirty Laundry to be a decently entertaining movie. I wouldn’t call it a good movie, but I had a good time watching it – especially for the last 30 minutes, which involves Vito relentlessly pursuing Jay and Trish across Los Angeles while Jay hands out thousands of dollars to several people they cross paths with. The chase is goofy fun, involving car chases in multiple vehicles, a foot chase through a restaurant and a karate school (and across a swimming pool), and eventually leads the characters to 'Macho' Marty’s mansion. I wouldn’t want to be watching this movie as the clock strikes midnight to begin a new year, but it was a fine way to spend some time on a random Sunday morning.
I FEEL PRETTY (2018)
The Amy Schumer comedy I Feel Pretty apparently had a good run at the box office, pulling in over $94 million – but somehow, it completely passed under my radar until it showed up on Netflix in Brazil recently. If I had heard about it before, and I probably did at least see the title at some point, it had left my mind by the time the movie showed up on Netflix. But once it was in front of me, I decided to give it a chance and watch it with blog contributor Priscilla. We both ended up enjoying it, while finding it kind of strange.
Writers/directors Abby Kohn and Marc Silverstein cast Schumer as Renee Bennett, a woman with low self-esteem who works on the website for the cosmetics company Lily LeClaire but dreams of working at the corporate headquarters as a receptionist so she could be in the midst of all the action. After making a wish in a fountain... and then falling down during a spin class and hitting her head... Renee comes to believe that she has undergone an amazing transformation. Although she looks exactly the same as she did before, when she looks in the mirror now, she sees a different person. She now believes that she’s a knock-out beauty.
Now armed with confidence, Renee lands her dream job as a Lily LeClaire receptionist, gets to interact with the company boss (Michelle Williams, delivering her lines with a high-pitched voice), strikes up a relationship with a man named Ethan (Rory Scovel), and assures her best friends Jane (Busy Philipps) and Vivian (Aidy Bryant) that, despite looking completely different, she is still their friend Renee.
So, basically, the movie comes off like an odd handling of a woman whose perception changes when she receives a traumatic head injury, but it actually has a nice message in there about accepting who you are and loving yourself, flaws and all. It’s a bit weird and awkward, but it’s a fun movie that provides some laughs.
FIVE FEET APART (2019)
Justin Baldoni has been in the entertainment news a lot lately, due to the messy lawsuit playing out between him and Blake Lively, the star of (and his co-star in) the romantic drama It Ends with Us. I haven’t seen that movie, but the reports of the lawsuit were the first time I really took notice of the name “Justin Baldoni,” despite the fact that he has been in the entertainment industry for over a decade. After years of acting, he made his feature directorial debut with the 2019 romantic drama Five Feet Apart – which I just happened to watch in the midst of the Baldoni / Lively legal mess because it was about to leave Brazilian Netflix and I was interested in checking it out, not realizing it was a Baldoni project.
I’ll leave it to the courts to decide what did or didn’t happen between Baldoni and Lively, but I will say that I found Five Feet Apart to be a really good movie. It plays like it was adapted from a young adult novel, but Baldoni was actually inspired to make the film while working on a documentary about cystic fibrosis called My Last Days. That project brought him into contact with a YouTuber named Claire Wineland, who had cystic fibrosis and worked as a consultant on the film, which was written by Tobias Iaconis and Mikki Daughtry.
Haley Lu Richardson delivers a great performance in the lead role of Stella Grant, a young woman living in the cystic fibrosis wing of a hospital, where fellow patients include Poe Ramirez (Moisés Arias) and Will Newman (Cole Sprouse). Stella is waiting for news on a lung transplant, while Will has recently received a devastating diagnosis: he has a B. Cepacia infection that makes him ineligible for a lung transplant. Since things are looking grim for him, Will is very laid-back and cynical, and doesn’t pay much attention to the things he’s supposed to do for treatment. This doesn’t sit well with Stella, who encourages him to do his treatments, and through their hospital-bound interactions they gradually fall in love. Problem is, they cannot make physical contact with each other.
I’ll admit, I knew nothing about cystic fibrosis before watching this movie and was unaware that patients have to stay six feet away from each other so they don’t pass infections. When she falls in love with Will, Stella decides to steal back one of those feet and allow herself to stay just five feet away from Will. Thus the title.
Five Feet Apart has some predictable movie moments, but it’s a very enjoyable and engrossing film, carried by impressive performances.
DEXTER: ORIGINAL SIN SEASON ONE (2024 – 2025)
Clyde Phillips was the showrunner on the first four seasons of the Showtime series Dexter, which starred Michael C. Hall as the title character, Dexter Morgan, who worked as a blood spatter analyst at the Miami Metro Police Department and was also a serial killer on the side – albeit one that follows a strict Code, crafted by his adoptive father Harry (who also worked at Miami Metro, as a homicide detective), that ensures that he doesn’t kill the innocent. He only kills other killers who have gotten away with murder. Eight years after Dexter’s eight season run came to an end, Phillips returned to oversee a follow-up show called Dexter: New Blood, which was supposed to be a limited series that would wrap up the franchise. But fans wanted more and Hall was willing to come back for more, so Phillips was all set to move forward with a New Blood sequel series called Dexter: Resurrection... until a Showtime executive said they wanted to put together a different show first. Something unexpected. A prequel series.
Prequels can be very challenging, and Dexter: Original Sin had the added challenge that it was going to have to cast younger versions of characters viewers have been following for many years and several seasons. Would new actors be accepted in these roles? Phillips was willing to take the challenge and see how it played out – and I think it all turned out very well.
Dexter: Original Sin takes us back to 1991 to show us how a young Dexter (now played by Patrick Gibson) got his start at Miami Metro. The series starts with a situation we saw glimpses of on the original show: Dexter’s adoptive father Harry (played here by Christian Slater) is hospitalized with a heart attack, and when Dexter realizes that his nurse is over-medicating him and other patients, choosing who in her care should live and who should die, she becomes Dexter’s first victim. His life saved by Dexter, Harry returns to work – and while he investigates cases, Dexter signs up as a forensic intern and starts working alongside his father’s co-workers. There’s Christina Milian as a younger version of detective María LaGuerta, James Martinez as the younger detective Angel Batista, Alex Shimizu as the younger forensic analyst Vince Masuka, Reno Wilson as Harry’s partner Bobby Watt, Patrick Dempsey as Captain Aaron Spencer, and Sarah Michelle Gellar as Tanya Martin, the chief of forensics. Several of the characters are people we know from the original show, and Phillips and his collaborators did a great job of casting actors who fit into the roles and do commendable work bringing these familiar characters to life in a familiar way.
The role of Dexter’s adoptive sister Debra, still a high school student at this point, was another challenging role to fill, and while Molly Brown doesn’t look as much like Jennifer Carpenter as some of the other recast actors look like their older counterparts, she was definitely able to deliver the Deb vibe.
None of this would work at all if Dexter felt off, but Patrick Gibson did a surprisingly great job of stepping into Michael C. Hall’s shoes and taking on the tone and demeanor of the character. This Dexter may look different, but he’s unmistakably Dexter.
It can also be difficult to make prequels interesting, but Phillips and the writers were able to craft an interesting story for this one. While Dexter finds some random killers to take down as the season goes on (including one who’s played by Joe Pantoliano, who doesn’t get to spend as much time in Dexter world as he should have), there are two situations that carry on through the entire season: someone is abducting and killing children, with Captain Spencer’s son even becoming one of the abducted, and Dexter thinks there’s another fledgling serial killer at work in the area, but Harry doesn’t see the connection between the murders. These storylines get major, and somewhat surprising, pay-offs at the end of the season.
Dexter: Original Sin is presented as if it’s Dexter’s life flashing before his eyes after he was seriously injured at the end of Dexter: New Blood, but the show isn’t entirely told from his perspective. We also get flashbacks to how Harry got involved with Dexter’s life back in the 1970s, with Brittany Allen appearing in several episodes as Dexter’s ill-fated mom Laura Moser. This means we also see a younger version of Dexter’s brother Brian. And if you’ve watched the first season of Dexter’s original run, you know how things go for Brian.
Fans can nitpick things about Dexter: Original Sin here and there. For example, there’s a timeline issue with the Angel Batista character, as we had heard he was still a uniformed police officer in the mid-’90s, but this show has him as a detective already in ‘91. Dexter also chooses some very unlikely places to carry out some of his murders, which isn't fitting for him when he's just getting started with all of this. There are some odd choices, and it's difficult to imagine how some characters are going to end up the way we know they end up... But overall, this was an entertaining addition to the franchise.
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