Imagine, if you will, there’s a dude sitting around in his man cave or maybe just a basement he calls his man cave because it has an old pool table in it or something and he’s drinking his cheap sh*tty beer and watching sports on tv and seeing an ad for a new superhero movie and thinking…not another one of this dude, these dudes look stupid in their stupid tights, these dudes look totally gay (yes, his thoughts), what I want is a properly manly man superhero, someone I can secretly fantasize about being. It is from this mental onanism that Jack Reacher must have sprung, fully formed, and as ridiculously implausible as any superhero or potentially even more so.
Yes, that’s right, Jack Reacher is the jism of all manly men of underperforming masculinity everywhere that gained sentience. There’s no other way to explain this ludicrous mountain of a man. 6’5” 250 lbs of solid muscle. He’s never wrong. He never loses a fight. He always says the right things. He can track people by the most tenuous of suppositions and solve crimes by the most tenuous of stretches, but because every word he says is imbued with a sort of preternatural confidence, everyone listens to Reacher. And then we’re back to Reacher’s never wrong.
Men want to be him, women want to be with him. He’s the American version of James Bond, meaning brutal and underdressed, among other things.
He loves killing, never thinks twice about it, never has ANY moral qualms about any of his decisions. His inner life is subtle and restricts itself to a few memories here and there. His military past is clandestine and apparently involved obscene death toll numbers.
Maybe Reacher isn’t Bond, after all. Maybe he’s Judge Dredd. A one-man investigative, judicial and executory force. Reacher needs no assistance. He’s here to assist you. If your small town is caught up in some evil machinations. Reacher will solve it and purify it. Mainly by killing all the evildoers involved.
Reacher doesn’t believe in drawn-out court proceedings, Reacher believes in a frontier sort of justice. Reacher is good for the economy that way.
Reacher cannot be stopped, not with pleas, not with force, and not with love, though plenty of women would try.
Reacher is the kind of heroic protagonist around whom innocent people frequently wind up dead. It doesn’t faze him, doesn’t even give him a pause. He avenges them.
Reacher is loyal to his old friends. Reacher is good to dogs. Reacher is built like Mr. Universe but is never seen working out. Reacher eats the crappiest of crap and never puts on a pound.
Reacher travels light. Possessions offer Reacher no comfort. The man doesn’t own so much as a bag.
Reacher can walk into any used clothing store or even a donation bin and walk out with perfectly fitting clothes, despite his unusually buff frame.
Reacher only owns one change of clothing at a time and replaces it when he gets blood on it, which is frequently.
Reacher washes his shirt du jour in the sink for the next day but neither his underwear nor his socks and this man gets a lot of physical activity during the day, meaning Reacher is a stinky boy. But no, Reacher’s sweat doesn’t stink – it wouldn’t dare.
Reacher smells like a man, like a proper man that he is.
Reacher’s neck is exactly as wide as his noggin’ and he makes it look natural. His biceps look like basketballs. His buttocks are like muscular watermelons. He is a physical perfection of a man, a moral perfection, a soldier/cop/justice system rolled into one.
There isn’t an action movie stereotype that Reacher doesn’t take on and outperform. And he does it all in regular pants, not tights. You gotta love it. You can get it on tv, all eight episodes of that nonsense.
 
Mind you, in its earlier cinematic reincarnation, Reacher was a positively diminutive presence as played by Cruise. And Lee Child, Reacher’s creator, was totally on board with that too, because, you know, cha-ching.
Child’s Reacher appears to be a Dolph Lundgren doppelganger. But of course, there is only one Dolph and he doesn’t the popularity for a character like that, plus he’s much too old for it now. So, the creators of the tv show got the next best thing.
Alan Ritchson is only 6’2” but is shot to look taller, plus given a shorter cast to work with. His musculature, though, is for real. Never a small guy to begin with, he got positively ripped for this role and he looks great. He is great in this role. Charismatic, fun, funny even, and very credible as an unstoppable brute force.
He walks into a small town in Georgia only to find out that his estranged brother has just been killed there. What? What are the odds? Anyway…the local yokels aren’t likely to sort this out even if they are led by a Yankee named Finlay, Goodwin essentially resuming his role of Babineaux from I-Zombie and an absolutely adorable lady cop who to no one’s surprise is going to have the lovehots for Reacher.
So, Reacher starts sorting this mess out himself, the body count starts climbing and the plot twists too, because apparently just about everyone is in on this. The plot is so convoluted, it’s difficult to care about it, but just looking at Reacher is strangely pleasant, he’s very nice to look at, he’s entertaining, you can watch his work his way through a phone book and be amused, probably.
Which is good, because there’s really no other reason to watch this series unless as a testosterone supplement. Jack Reacher is an impossible fantasy, a thoroughly unreal character, but we live in the day and age where such things rule, as is exemplified by the obscene amount of superhero movies and shows out there.
The appeal behind this is pretty obvious…people feel like they have no power. They want to at least watch power. Reacher has a lot of power. He is a Superman for people with no imagination and a killing appetite. He is a sign of times. He is an emblem of our times.
It’s kind of tragic. But at least he looks good doing it – the it he does. And the world agrees, Amazon renewed the show for the second season almost right away. Long live the oversized muscles and suspension of reality.

​Ever since I saw the trailer for Nightmare Alley, I’ve been obsessed with the movie. Not just because I’m a huge Del Tor fan. Not just because I love all movies set in circuses. Not just because it has a just about perfect cast. But there was something about it, that grand sweeping quality, that power the cinema has to take you away from the quotidian blandness, from normal life.
And now I finally watched it. And now I think I might be kind of disappointed. But really, I need to process my feelings and this review is meant to help me do that.
How can I be disappointed? I’ve never been disappointed by a Del Toro production before. The man’s work just doesn’t have that setting. It’s always dazzling, always spectacular, always spectacularly dazzlingly moving and poignant. What’s missing here?
 
Nightmare Alley is an adaptation of a classic noir novel from the 40s. This is Del Toro’s most Americana production, by far his most grounded in reality one, albeit a distant WWII era reality. The story is pure Americana too. A quick rise and a meteoric fall of a man. A classic arc of a classic protagonist. A surefire straight-forward interpretation of the American dream. Get money or die trying. For in a civilized American society money equals power and respect above all else.
Not so in the circus society, which is the very fringe version of a real world. There it’s all about family, camaraderie, etc.  It’s where the story’s protagonist, Stan, first ends up after walking away very dramatically from a building on fire – and that’s just the opening scene.
 
In the circus, Stan finds himself, finds work, finds some sense of worth among people who do not ask too many questions. He gets in tight with the show’s fortunetellers, the Krumbeins ,played by the incomparable Toni Colette and her alcoholic mastermind husband David Strathairn. Collette’s Madame Zeena is all too quick to jump Stan’s studly bones. I mean, it’s Bradley Cooper, people, you can’t blame her. She subsequently declares him good for business, and thus he proceeds to hang around the couple and learning the tricks of their trade. He also doesn’t waste too much time upgrading from Zeena to the much younger Molly - Rooney Mara who gets shot through with electricity for her act and other than that has lamentably almost nothing to do but look the innocent ingenue that she is. An act she’s perfectly good at since she seems to be refusing to age and in her mid 30s easier passes for someone a decade younger.
 
Fast-forward a couple of years and Stan is thriving. He has perfected the Krumbein’s mentalist act having inherited his secret black book and now Stan and Molly have a successful lounge act all of their own. Enter Lilith Ritter. A woman so vampy that her name is Lilith. Played to juicy perfection by Cate Blanchett, who embodies all the grace and pizzazz of classic movie vamps of a bygone era from demeanor to voice. Perfect.
 
Needless to say, Stan is very taken up by her, she challenges him, threatens him, pushes him in a way that lovely meek Molly wouldn’t dream off. And thus, Stan pushes himself for grander and grander cons, letting his ambition stretch his talent into unsupportable lengths. Stan gets involved with a dangerous terrible and very wealthy man played by a nearly unrecognizable Jenkins then promptly engineers his own downfall.
 
In the end, like so many noir stories, it’s a tale of a mismanaged ambition, unchecked greed and getting twisted up in lies, one’s own and others’.
 
So, it all sound great, doesn’t it? Why doesn’t it work quite as great? Why’d it underperform at the box office so dramatically? Do people not care for neo-noir? Is it the somewhat leisure pacing? Is it the fact that in this day and age of strong female characters and feminist agendas, the movie, despite boasting a stunning range of female acting talent, doesn’t give them that much to do?
 
Ok, the latter isn’t strictly the case. Cate Blanchett’s character has tons to do, for instance, but we are never sure of her motivations, for this is first and foremost very much Stan’s story.
Rooney Mara is practically wasted.
Toni Colette is woefully underused.
This is, as the song says, a men’s world.
 
I don’t know if that’s it either. I just know that despite the movie being as gorgeous as any Del Toro’s ever done and by gorgeous I mean absolutely complete visually arresting, despite having a strong compelling story, something’s missing here, Some of that Del Toro magic isn’t here. It’s almost like he took himself too seriously with this movie, tried to do too serious of a movie strategically.
It’s still good, very, very good, it just isn’t quite great. Which is an unfair rubric one might say, but it’s Del Toro’s own fault for setting up expectations so high after years of mind-blowingly awesome work.
 
I’m glad I saw it. It was in every meaning of a word spectacular. Frankly, wanting more out of it just might be greedy, which is ironic for a movie that’s all about the evils of greed. Recommended.

It takes a good knowledge of the subject to spoof it expertly. When it’s done right, you can tell. And so, behold, a thriller spoof done right.
From an executive producer/leading star Veronica Mars herself who is no stranger to the genre and a trio of very clever people I’m not familiar with comes a mini-series so delightfully absurdist, so gleefully wink-wink-nudge-nudge, so charmingly offbeat that you can’t resist it. And because it’s only 8 short (under 30 minute) episodes, you don’t have to…go ahead and binge, this is bingeworthy.
As the title (a nifty conglomeration of so many ubiquitous genre titles out there) lets us know, this is one of those murder witnessed thrillers. The witness, though, Bell’s Anna, is a wildly unreliable narrator, mixed up by grief, anti-depressants and copious amounts of wino. Anna sits around her oversized post-divorce abode, drinking wine and spying on the hunky new neighbor across the street. The neighbor has an adorable daughter around the same age Anna’s was when she was tragically murdered under circumstances so outrageous that it’s impossible not to find the comedy in tragedy there.
Anna bakes casseroles she drops. Over and over again. In fancy casserole dishes no less. Anna has a bizarre phobia of rain. Anna has a handyman who has been working on the same mailbox for what seems like an indefinitely long time. Anna sees her new neighbor’s flighty flight attendant girlfriend murdered in the window and becomes obsessed with it. All the more so, since there’s no body or evidence of the crime. Anna decides to play detective, while the real detectives around her do the same, much to her hunky neighbor’s (who’s all like come hang one minute and I have a gun, stay away from my family the next) annoyance. Anna cyberstalks her ex. Anna hooks up with a hunky suspect. Anna reupholsters her chair.
These who murdered who (if anyone) shenanigans go on, twisting and turning right down to a genuinely innovative, surprising, and wildly entertaining denouement.
All in all, oodles of fun.
I read tons of thrillers. Thrillers exactly like the one this show spoofs. Because they are everywhere. And because some of them are actually pretty good, provided you sieve through enough chaff to get to the wheat. Sometimes they are even as good as this show. But not often. Thriller movies are seldom this good because they take themselves too seriously. This is a perfect combination of black comedy and thrillers – one that finetunes its tonal bizarro quality to perfection.
If this thing has a fault, it’s that it might be too clever for its own good, specifically, too clever for the low hanging fruits Netflix audiences typically love. The kind of audience who might not recognize a parody and take this for a straight-faced mystery show might come away bewildered, confused, and disappointed. A anyone with a more refined viewing palate ought to find this very entertaining.
An absolute tongue-in-cheek delight. Recommended.