CAPSULE MOVIE REVIEWS: 9-25-26
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My Film Critic pants are quite fetching; they are on, pressed, and ironed. I'm ready to review six new movies in this week's capsule (short) movie reviews for Friday, September 25th, 2026.
Heart of the Beast is what you might call an absolute crowd pleaser. This is one of those movies that has been constructed almost scientifically to make a theater full of people gasp, tense up, laugh, sit on the edge of their seats and, eventually, cry their damn eyes out. And you know what? It works.
It's also a surprisingly emotional movie to come from David Ayer. Ayer made his name writing and directing tough, gritty movies about cops, criminals and morally compromised men.
He wrote Training Day and Dark Blue, wrote and directed Harsh Times, and directed Street Kings and the terrific End of Watch. He made Suicide Squad, has worked with Jason Statham, and previously directed Brad Pitt in the World War II tank movie Fury.
So when I heard David Ayer had made a movie about Brad Pitt and a three-legged German Shepherd trying to survive together in the Alaskan wilderness, I wasn't exactly expecting Old Yeller. But that's one of the nice surprises of Heart of the Beast.
Pitt plays James Belmont, a retired Army Special Forces veteran who spent decades serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. He's scarred, physically and psychologically, and he's living a quiet life with Odin, his former military combat dog.
Odin is scarred, too. He's a 100-pound German Shepherd with three legs, a prosthetic limb and titanium teeth, and he also suffers from PTSD.
That's the element of Heart of the Beast I found most interesting. James and Odin aren't simply a man and his beloved dog. They're both veterans. They served together, they were both injured, they're both retired, and they're both traumatized. More importantly, they're taking care of each other.
Early in the movie, Odin has nightmares about combat. He twitches and struggles in his sleep, and James holds him, calms him down and essentially tells him, "It's okay. The war is over." Dogs can suffer from PTSD.
They can dream. They can have nightmares. They can be deeply traumatized by experiences just as humans can, and the movie takes that seriously without turning Odin into some adorable Disney animal with human emotions pasted onto him. He's a soldier, and that distinction becomes incredibly important as the movie goes along.
James and Odin have essentially retired together to spend whatever time they have left fishing, camping, flying around Alaska in James' Cessna and trying to find some peace.
There's a scene early on where Pitt is standing in the water fly-fishing, and I heard several people in the audience chuckling. Of course they were. It's Brad Pitt fly-fishing. Thirty-five years after A River Runs Through It, there he is again. All I needed was Robert Redford narrating.
Odin turns out to be a pretty good fisherman himself, and these early scenes establish the relationship beautifully. Then they meet an eccentric old prospector named Brian, played by J.K. Simmons, who joins James for some beers and conversation.
Simmons is basically there for two scenes, but his character serves a very smart screenwriting purpose. James has somebody to talk to, which means we learn naturally about his military background, his injuries, Odin's history and how the dog lost his leg.
That's all the exposition we really need, but unfortunately, Ayer doesn't entirely trust it. Throughout the movie we keep flashing back to James and Odin in combat, and while a few of those images are effective, there are simply too many of them.
We already understand that these two are traumatized. Pitt's performance tells us. Odin's behavior tells us. Their scars tell us. The nightmares tell us. We get it. The movie doesn't need to keep interrupting itself to remind us.
Brian also warns James that a massive storm is coming, so James decides to get Odin into the plane and head out. Then James has a massive heart attack while flying, which is obviously not ideal. Knowing he's about to lose consciousness, James throws Odin out of the plane to save him.
The Cessna crashes into a glacial lake and sinks. Somehow James survives, but he's badly injured, his heart is failing, Odin is hurt, and they're stranded approximately 58 miles from the nearest road.
Now the movie becomes what we've come for: a man, his dog and the wilderness. And Heart of the Beast is very good at this stuff.
One of the most intense sequences has James diving back into the freezing lake to reach the sunken plane and retrieve two enormous cases containing the equipment and medical supplies he and Odin will need.
Remember, this man has just had a heart attack. He's injured and exhausted, and now he's repeatedly diving underwater, holding his breath and dragging heavy cases from a submerged airplane. I was practically having a heart attack for him.
From there, James and Odin begin the 58-mile trek, and Ayer turns the wilderness into one obstacle after another without making the movie feel like a video game. There's an excruciating sequence involving a decaying tree trunk that they have to use as a bridge across a raging gorge.
There are mudfields that aren't what James' map says they are. The weather gets worse, James gets weaker, Odin's prosthetic leg is tested constantly, and both of them are bleeding and exhausted.
Then there's a grizzly bear. The bear itself is probably the movie's weakest special effect. The CGI isn't entirely convincing, and in a movie where so much of the environment feels tangible and dangerous, you notice it.
But the scene still works because of Odin. This three-legged German Shepherd stares down a frigging grizzly bear, and somehow I bought it.
Later, James and Odin are attacked in the darkness by a pack of wolves, and this sequence is brutal. The movie doesn't suddenly turn them into invincible action heroes. They survive because they're trained soldiers and because their instincts from combat take over.
James uses his knife and his hands, Odin uses those titanium teeth, and both get badly hurt. And somehow, they have to keep going.
The wilderness sequences are beautifully photographed and genuinely suspenseful. If you like survival movies about people fighting their way through unforgiving terrain, Heart of the Beast absolutely delivers.
There are echoes of The Call of the Wild, Iron Will, Alpha and Eight Below, the very good Paul Walker movie about abandoned sled dogs. There's also a little bit of The Grey, although thankfully Brad Pitt doesn't start taping broken airplane bottles to his hands and challenging wolves to fistfights.
Considering the condition he's in by the end of this movie, however, I wouldn't have completely ruled it out.
There is a lot of Pitt talking to Odin, which creates another potential problem. Obviously, James has to speak because otherwise we'd spend enormous stretches watching a guy silently hiking beside a dog.
Some of the dialogue is clearly there because WE need to know what James is thinking, and I'm not convinced that a man alone in the wilderness would necessarily announce every piece of information to his German Shepherd. But Ayer and Pitt mostly make it feel natural.
If you've ever had a dog, you know you talk to them anyway. You have entire conversations with them. They look at you like they understand every word, and sometimes you're pretty sure they understand more than the humans in your life.
Pitt is very good here because he doesn't turn James into some indestructible Special Forces badass. He's old, damaged, frightened and physically failing, and every mile costs him something.
But the best performance in the movie belongs to Odin. Four dogs were used to play the character in different sequences, with a dog named Uber doing much of the principal work, and these animals are extraordinary.
There is never a moment when I stopped believing in Odin as a character, and that's crucial. If we don't care about this dog, the movie dies. I cared about him enormously.
That's ultimately why Heart of the Beast works as well as it does. On the simplest level, it's a very effective survival thriller about a man and a dog trying to make it through 58 miles of Alaskan wilderness alive. But underneath that, it's a movie about two wounded veterans trying to get each other home. That's the heart of the movie.
The final few minutes really got me. Pitt delivers a beautiful voice-over about Odin, their shared experiences and what military dogs give during their service.
The movie then provides information about dogs trained and used by the military and the importance of giving these animals good homes and peaceful lives after their service is finished.
I teared up. Okay, I cried. I'm a sucker for dogs. Sue me.
But the emotion here feels earned because the movie has spent its running time showing James and Odin as partners rather than owner and pet. Each one has saved the other. Each one carries scars from the same war. And each one recognizes something in the other that nobody else completely can. That's pretty powerful stuff.
I could have done without some of the repetitive combat flashbacks, and a few of the visual effects (particularly that grizzly) could have used additional work. But those are relatively minor complaints in a movie that does what it sets out to do extremely well.
Heart of the Beast is exciting, scary, suspenseful, beautifully photographed and ultimately very moving. It's an unusually tender movie for David Ayer, and Brad Pitt gives another strong, understated performance.
But if you love dogs, you've been warned. Bring tissues. Lots of them. Heart of the Beast is one of the better and more purely entertaining movies of the early fall, and I'm absolutely recommending it. - ⭐️⭐️⭐️1/2
Primetime is going to piss off a lot of people.
I knew that almost immediately after seeing it. A fellow critic sitting next to me at the press screening absolutely despised it. I mean hated it. Other people around me were clearly having a great time, while some looked like they couldn't wait to get out of the theater.
I don't think this is going to be one of those movies where people shrug and say, "Yeah, it was okay." You're either going to go with this thing or you're going to reject it completely. I went with it. In fact, I think Primetime is one of the best movies of the year.
It's a crazy, nasty, black-as-night psychological comedy, media satire and thriller about the creation and success of To Catch a Predator, the enormously popular Dateline NBC series hosted by Chris Hansen.
It's based on Luke Dittrich's 2007 Esquire article "Tonight on Dateline This Man Will Die," and it's the narrative feature debut of documentary filmmaker Lance Oppenheim, working from the first screenplay by Ajon Singh. And these guys don't ease into anything.
The movie opens with Robert Pattinson as Chris Hansen rehearsing.
He's standing there practicing the filthy, sexually explicit chat-room exchanges he's going to repeat when he confronts one of the predators who has been lured into the house by somebody pretending to be an underage kid. Pattinson keeps trying the lines, adjusting the delivery, preparing for his big moment like an actor rehearsing Shakespeare.
Except the dialogue involves an adult man describing what he wants to do sexually to a child. Welcome to Primetime.
The opening tells you immediately what kind of movie you're watching. This is going to be dark, adult, uncomfortable, funny in ways you might feel guilty about and completely uninterested in reassuring you that anybody involved has pure motives.
The story takes place in 2006, when To Catch a Predator had become a phenomenon. Hansen was presented on television as this righteous defender of public safety, calmly stepping out of the shadows to confront these creeps after they walked into a house expecting to meet a child.
"Why don't you have a seat?" America LOVED this stuff.
But Primetime isn't particularly interested in Chris Hansen as a crusader for justice. This version of Hansen is interested in Chris Hansen.
Pattinson plays him as a narcissistic, fame-hungry television personality who increasingly enjoys the performance of catching predators more than whatever public service the program is supposedly providing. He likes the camera. He likes being recognized. He likes being the hero. He likes delivering the lines. He likes Chris Hansen.
Pattinson is great. It's not simply an imitation, although he gets Hansen's distinctive voice and cadence beautifully. Pattinson pushes the character slightly beyond impersonation into something stranger and funnier.
There's a theatrical quality to him, as though Hansen is always aware that somewhere, somehow, there might be a camera pointed at him. The result is a performance that's funny and disturbing at the same time.
Behind Hansen is producer Andie Bender, played by Merritt Wever, and Wever is absolutely brilliant. She's running the operation from behind the scenes, watching monitors, managing the insanity and worrying about the only measurement television executives eventually care about: ratings.
Matthew Maher, another actor I always enjoy, plays Xavier Von Erck, founder of the vigilante organization Perverted-Justice. He's the "bait dispatcher," communicating online with potential predators while pretending to be children and helping lure them into the sting house.
Then there are the actual decoys.
Phoebe Bridgers plays Del Harvey, an experienced decoy who can slip between different identities, while Skyler Gisondo plays Dan Plumb, a new recruit and aspiring actor who becomes almost as important to the movie as Hansen himself.
Dan's introduction is hilarious.
We first see him auditioning on videotape, desperately trying to demonstrate that he is a SERIOUS ACTOR. He's the kind of young performer who wants so badly to get his break that you can practically smell the desperation coming through the television monitor.
At one point he starts singing "Seasons of Love" from Rent (which actually has a powerful callback in the final third of the film), because he is such a serious actor. Then NBC hires him to pretend to be a child so sexual predators will enter a house filled with hidden cameras. Show Business!
Dan approaches the job as if this might finally be his big break. He studies how to appear younger. He works on his character. He takes direction. He desperately wants to be convincing, not necessarily because he has some profound commitment to catching predators, but because he wants to be good at his job and (most importantly) he wants to be on television.
That becomes one of the movie's central jokes, and eventually one of its most disturbing ideas.
There's a great sequence where Dan watches Inside the Actors Studio and studies Billy Bob Thornton explaining how he created his character in Sling Blade: the voice, the jaw, the physical mannerisms.
Dan watches this as though James Lipton and Billy Bob Thornton are handing him the secrets of the acting universe, and he begins incorporating these little tricks into his own performance as a decoy.
I laughed very hard at this.
It's also a perfect extension of what the movie is saying. Even the process of learning how to act has been reduced to consuming television. Dan isn't learning by living or studying or developing a craft. He's watching another actor explain his tricks on a TV show and copying them. Everything comes through the screen.
Then Jeff Zucker shows up, playing a fictionalized version of himself, and the whole operation gets even crazier. NBC wants To Catch a Predator in primetime. Suddenly this supposedly serious piece of investigative journalism has to compete directly with Lost, which in 2006 was one of the biggest shows on television.
Now they've got to beat the frigging polar bear. And that's when Primetime really starts tightening the screws.
Catching random creeps isn't enough anymore. They need bigger targets. Better stories. More drama. Hansen starts talking about catching a "whale," somebody important enough to turn the show into a genuine television event. Because justice apparently has sweeps-week ratings.
Meanwhile Hansen's personal life is falling apart. His wife, played in a small but terrific performance by Anna Faris, knows their marriage is collapsing. Stories about Hansen's infidelities threaten to expose the supposedly righteous television hero as another deeply flawed guy whose private behavior doesn't resemble the persona he's selling America.
I love the irony of a man whose career depends on hidden cameras and exposing other people's secret lives suddenly becoming terrified that somebody is watching him.
Oppenheim reinforces all of this with one of the strangest visual styles I've seen in a movie this year. Primetime constantly moves between different textures. Sometimes it looks like crappy television video. Sometimes it's dark, grainy and ugly. Then suddenly it's beautifully sharp and cinematic. There are surreal sequences, bizarre lighting choices and images that seem almost like fantasies.
It shouldn't work. Somehow, it does.
The visual instability is exactly right for a movie where television and reality are constantly bleeding into each other. We aren't always sure whether we're watching the event, the television version of the event, somebody performing for the television version of the event, or a character's increasingly warped perception of reality.
And practically everybody is performing.
That's another reason some people are going to hate this movie. These aren't restrained, naturalistic performances. The acting is deliberately heightened. Everybody is just a little strange, a little exaggerated, a little off. The entire film has the feeling of reality television pushed about five degrees beyond reality until it becomes a fever dream.
There are wonderful little casting choices throughout. Jonathan Lipnicki, the adorable little kid from Jerry Maguire, appears as one of the predators caught in the sting. Think about that casting for a second.
Creed Bratton shows up as an absolutely deranged Hansen admirer who gets excited by fantasies of what should happen to these predators. Anybody who watched The Office brings their own association with Creed into the scene, which makes the whole thing even weirder.
But the movie's most important relationship is between Hansen and Dan. They're really two versions of the same person at different stages (there is also a weird father/son dynamic).
Dan is at the beginning. He'll do anything for his break. He wants to act. He wants to be seen. He wants somebody to tell him he belongs in this business. Hansen already has all of it. And he wants more.
Eventually the hunt for the "whale" leads them to a Texas assistant district attorney, played by Alex Winter, and that's where the movie stops being quite so funny.
The real To Catch a Predator story eventually collided with an actual tragedy involving an assistant district attorney targeted by the operation who died by suicide as law enforcement and cameras closed in. Primetime builds toward that event, and the final portion becomes increasingly bleak.
The laughs start disappearing.
Dan, who began the movie believing he'd landed this cool acting gig, has been exposed to increasingly horrific material and real danger. He's traumatized. He wants out. But Hansen knows exactly how to manipulate him into continuing. The machinery needs him.
That's what becomes genuinely disturbing about the movie. By this point, whether the predators are actually prosecuted almost feels secondary to everyone involved. What matters is whether they have footage. What matters is whether they have a show. What matters is whether they beat Lost.
And what matters to Dan is whether he finally gets his SAG card. That becomes the movie's ultimate punchline, and it's a great one.
I'm not going to give away the final scene, but the payoff is huge because by then Primetime has spent the entire movie showing us people converting real horror into content. Predators, victims, cops, producers, actors, journalists, everybody eventually becomes part of the production.
Primetime is brutal about television, but I don't think its target stops there. It's also about us. We're the people watching this shit. We're the ones who turned To Catch a Predator into entertainment.
We could tell ourselves it was about justice and protecting children, but millions of people weren't tuning in because they were studying criminal procedure.
They wanted to watch Chris Hansen walk into the room and say, "Why don't you have a seat?" That's entertainment. And Primetime takes that uncomfortable idea and pushes it until it becomes grotesque.
Robert Pattinson gives one of the best performances of his career, Merritt Wever is terrific, Skyler Gisondo is funny and ultimately heartbreaking, and the supporting cast is filled with weird, inspired choices. Oppenheim directs the movie like somebody who has been waiting his entire life to make a narrative feature and decided to throw every idea he had into the first one.
Some people are going to think it's too much. I understand that. It's twisted, juvenile, surreal, ugly, hilarious, deliberately abrasive and occasionally completely nuts. Then, during its final stretch, it becomes genuinely upsetting.
Primetime is one of the ballsiest movies I've seen this year, it's a brazen, sick, very funny and ultimately devastating satire about television, celebrity and what happens when human misery becomes programming.
It's absolutely not going to be everybody's cup of tea. But it's one of the best movies of 2026. - ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
It's always nice when a movie comes along and completely surprises you, especially when you walk into it knowing almost nothing. I really didn't know what to expect from Forgotten Island, the latest big animated movie from DreamWorks, and frankly I wasn't expecting much of anything. DreamWorks has always been a little unpredictable.
They've made some terrific animated movies over the years, and they've made some pretty forgettable ones, too. It's not quite like seeing the Pixar logo come up on the screen, where (despite a few notable exceptions) I still have a certain amount of confidence that I'm probably going to see something good.
With DreamWorks, you never really know.
So I am very pleasantly surprised to report that Forgotten Island is a wild, funny, beautifully animated and surprisingly thoughtful fantasy adventure about friendship, memories, outsiders, weirdos and Filipino culture.
It has terrific music, wonderful character designs, some genuinely scary stuff, a lot of very funny material and an emotional center that works because I actually cared about the two people at the center of it.
The movie is set in the Philippines during the 1990s and follows two lifelong friends, Jo and Raissa, voiced by H.E.R. and Liza Soberano. They meet as kids after Jo, the weird loner new girl, gives a show-and-tell presentation that goes completely haywire and alienates pretty much everybody in the room. Everybody except Raissa, who stands up for her.
And that's it. They're friends.
The opening section establishes their relationship through a montage of their lives together, and it reminded me a little bit of the beginning of Up. Now, it doesn't go all the way to where Up goes (you don't have to worry about DreamWorks emotionally destroying you within the first ten minutes) but it uses that same idea of compressing years of a relationship into a relatively short amount of screen time.
We watch Jo and Raissa grow up together, share adventures, get into trouble and accumulate memories, represented by little charms they add to their homemade friendship bracelets. With wonderful, weird memories, and a nice use of music.
The music throughout Forgotten Island is actually used extremely well. The movie is very deliberately set in the '90s, and the soundtrack becomes part of its personality rather than just an excuse to throw nostalgic needle drops at the audience.
INXS's "Never Tear Us Apart" is used beautifully in the film, and DMX's "Party Up" shows up later during one of the crazier sequences, and the movie knows how to use the energy of that music with the animation rather than simply playing a familiar song and expecting us to applaud because we recognize it.
As Jo and Raissa get older, adulthood begins threatening the little world they've created together. Raissa is the smart, driven, Type-A one, and she's preparing to leave the Philippines to attend Caltech in America. Jo is the more aimless artist, raised by her grandmother Lola, and she's stuck working at a fast-food chicken restaurant while her best friend prepares to move halfway around the world.
Jo wants to be supportive. She is not particularly good at it.
During what is supposed to be their final celebration before Raissa leaves, Jo accidentally opens a portal to Nakali, the mysterious forgotten island that her grandmother has been telling her about since childhood.
The two wake up on the island with no memory of the previous 12 hours. Raissa's hair has been partially burned off, Jo suddenly has a tattoo, and neither one knows exactly what the hell happened.
Even more concerning is that some strange hybrid dog-boy named Raww, voiced by Dave Franco, apparently knows them. Oh, and Raissa has somehow stolen the wings of a terrifying supernatural creature.
So they've had a busy evening.
Nakali is populated by characters inspired by Filipino folklore and mythology, and this is where the movie really takes off visually. Raww is this wonderfully goofy were-dog who transforms back and forth, and the girls also encounter Bungi, a demon baby voiced by Manny Jacinto; the wonderfully named Truffle Wuffle, a Duwende king voiced by Ronny Chieng; Datu, a giant tree creature voiced by Jo Koy; and Batiba, an agoraphobic cat voiced by Jenny Slate.
I love Jenny Slate. She's a terrific comedic actress, she was great on Saturday Night Live, and she has become one of those performers whose voice immediately adds something distinctive to an animated character.
She's also, of course, the voice of Marcel in Marcel the Shell with Shoes On, one of my favorite animated characters ever created. Anytime Jenny Slate shows up in something like this, I'm happy.
But the character who really stands out is Manang, the dreaded Manananggal, voiced by Lea Salonga. She is genuinely frightening. This isn't one of those animated-movie villains who looks vaguely menacing but is carefully designed so no six-year-old could possibly be upset.
Manang is WEIRD. She's disturbing. She's this supernatural, winged, bifurcated creature whose missing wings become an important part of the story, and there are moments involving her that are surprisingly dark and creepy.
I loved that.
The movie isn't afraid to let its fantasy world become genuinely strange. It can be bright, goofy and funny one minute and then introduce an image that might give some younger kids nightmares the next.
But unlike some movies that randomly throw tonal changes at you, the darker material here feels like it belongs to the mythology of Nakali.
The central idea is that the longer Jo and Raissa remain on this island, the more their memories begin to disappear. And that gives all of the crazy fantasy material an unexpectedly emotional foundation. The real danger isn't simply that they're trapped in some magical place filled with monsters. It's that they could eventually forget each other.
That's a pretty powerful idea for a movie about lifelong friendship.
The story becomes about memory, betrayal, selflessness and the terrifying realization that the people who mean everything to us can eventually become distant, and not necessarily because anybody did something terrible, but because life changes. People move. People grow up.
Jo doesn't want Raissa to leave because she is terrified of losing her. Raissa needs to leave because she has her own life to live. Neither one is entirely wrong, and that gives the movie more emotional complexity than I expected.
I also really liked the way Filipino culture is woven into everything. The food, family relationships, folklore, mythology and language aren't just decorative details added around a generic DreamWorks story. They are part of the movie's identity. There is even a very funny recurring gag involving a disapproving portrait of Jesus that made me laugh every time it appeared.
Visually, the movie is terrific. The character designs are incredibly expressive, and the animation pulls from several different places without feeling like a direct copy of any one of them.
There are obvious Japanese animation influences, some wild exaggeration that occasionally reminded me of Ralph Bakshi, and you can certainly feel the impact that the Spider-Verse movies have had on modern animation, with the willingness to break away from the polished, uniform computer-animation look and allow different textures, movements and visual styles to coexist.
There's a looseness and craziness to Forgotten Island that I really appreciated. Transformations can become completely absurd. Characters stretch and distort. Colors explode across the screen. Nakali itself feels like a place where almost anything could be waiting around the next corner. And more importantly, I liked being there.
That's a big deal with a fantasy movie. You can create 10,000 creatures and invent 500 pages of mythology, but if I don't want to spend time in the world you've created, none of that matters. Nakali feels populated by actual personalities instead of merchandise opportunities.
If the movie has a problem, it comes during the final 20 minutes or so. The filmmakers have introduced so many characters, threats, relationships, betrayals, memory problems and unresolved conflicts that eventually they have to start wrapping everything up, and you can feel the movie racing through its checklist.
It gets repetitive, and the climax becomes a little overloaded. Some emotional beats that probably deserved more time are rushed because the movie has so many pieces moving simultaneously. It doesn't destroy what came before it, but I do wish the filmmakers had given the ending a little more room to breathe.
Still, that's a relatively minor complaint considering how surprised I was by almost everything else.
The movie was written and directed by Joel Crawford and Januel Mercado, who previously worked together on Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, another movie I went into with modest expectations and ended up really liking. Crawford and Mercado have become filmmakers I'm genuinely interested in following. They have a real affection for oddballs. That's ultimately what I liked most about Forgotten Island.
It's a celebration of weirdos.
It's about the kid who doesn't fit in, the friend who stands beside them anyway, and the realization that loving somebody doesn't mean freezing your relationship at the moment when everything felt perfect. People change. Memories fade. Life moves forward whether you're ready for it or not.
And somehow this movie gets at all of that while also giving us demon babies, were-dogs, terrifying Filipino monsters, Jenny Slate as an agoraphobic cat and DMX.
I wasn't expecting any of this.
Forgotten Island is funny, colorful, occasionally scary, culturally specific, beautifully animated and much more sensitive than it initially appears.
DreamWorks surprised me with this one. I'm very happy to recommend Forgotten Island. - ⭐️⭐️⭐️1/2
There is absolutely nothing wrong with telling a simple story. I wish more filmmakers understood that.
You can make a great movie about two people meeting, falling in love, building a life together and eventually discovering that love may not be enough to keep them together. You don't need a giant twist. You don't need some elaborate structural conceit.
You don't need to constantly jump around in time, change aspect ratios, switch visual textures and announce to the audience every five minutes that you are MAKING A MOVIE.
If the characters are interesting, the writing is good and the performances are strong, just tell the damn story.
Charlie Harper doesn't trust itself enough to do that.
This is the feature directorial debut of Mac Eldridge and Tom Dean, with Dean also writing the screenplay, and it's basically a five-year relationship story involving Charlie, played by Nick Robinson, and Harper, played by Emilia Jones.
It's about two young people who fall in love, leave their Florida hometown behind, move to New Orleans and discover that the things that attracted them to each other when they were younger don't necessarily translate into a sustainable adult relationship.
Fine, that is a movie.
Unfortunately, Eldridge and Dean apparently decided that wasn't enough, so Charlie Harper becomes a pretentious little mess of scrambled chronology, shifting aspect ratios, changing visual textures, grainy memories, camcorder footage and constant jumps backward and forward through the relationship. Instead of pulling me deeper into these characters, the filmmaking kept pushing me away from them.
The movie opens with Harper being asked if she considers herself a nostalgic person, which becomes the launching point for all of this memory-hopping. We bounce around between different stages of the relationship, eventually seeing how Charlie and Harper originally met when they were younger.
Charlie is this aimless kid who is a grade ahead of Harper and working as a teacher's assistant in one of her classes. They connect, burn CDs for each other, and a romance develops. Remember burning CDs for somebody? That was a commitment.
The movie follows them from those early days through their decision to leave Florida and eventually move to New Orleans, where Harper begins seriously pursuing a career as a chef.
She's ambitious, organized and determined. Charlie, on the other hand, doesn't really know what the hell he wants to do. He procrastinates. He drifts. He becomes increasingly self-destructive, while Harper becomes increasingly controlling because she believes she can somehow fix him.
And right there you have everything you need for a relationship drama.
One person is moving forward while the other isn't. One thinks love means helping the other person become something better, while the other increasingly experiences that help as judgment and control. Resentment grows. Arguments repeat themselves. The things that once seemed charming become irritating.
Eventually both people start wondering whether they are still together because they love each other or because they've simply been together for so long that they don't know how to stop.
We've seen versions of this story many times because people actually live versions of this story all the time. That's exactly why you don't need all the gimmicks.
Instead, Eldridge and Dean chop the relationship into pieces and keep shuffling the deck. Past and present are differentiated through changing aspect ratios, lighting and textures. Some memories have this grainy, nostalgic quality.
Other sections are sharper and more claustrophobic. We get happy camcorder memories contrasted with ugly arguments inside cars. The visual presentation keeps changing to tell us where we are emotionally and chronologically rather than allowing the writing and performances to do that work. I found it incredibly distracting.
It also feels heavily influenced by Christopher Nolan, and anybody who has followed my reviews over the years probably knows this is not going to lead to a compliment. Nolan has made an entire career out of playing with chronology, structure, aspect ratios and different visual formats, and he has been celebrated endlessly for doing it. I've frequently found those devices unnecessary and pretentious.
When every filmmaking decision is screaming, "LOOK AT THE STRUCTURE," I start wondering why the filmmaker doesn't trust the story.
Sometimes fractured chronology can be essential. Sometimes the way a movie manipulates time actually IS the story. But when you're dealing with something as intimate and recognizable as the gradual collapse of a romantic relationship, scrambling the chronology doesn't automatically make the material deeper. Sometimes it just makes it scrambled.
The first section of Charlie Harper is needlessly confusing because I spent too much time trying to determine exactly where we were in the relationship instead of becoming emotionally involved with Charlie and Harper themselves. Once I figured out the movie's system, it didn't become more profound. It simply became easier to follow.
Those are two very different things.
The screenplay itself isn't particularly complicated. Charlie procrastinates. Harper is controlling. Charlie screws up. Harper tries to fix him. He resents her for trying to fix him. She resents him for requiring so much fixing. They love each other, they hurt each other, they reconnect, they fight again.
The frustrating thing is that the two actors at the center of Charlie Harper are good enough that the movie occasionally works despite everything being done around them.
Nick Robinson has the more frustrating role because Charlie is essentially another variation on the self-destructive young man who can't get his life together. That's an archetype we've seen countless times, and the screenplay doesn't give Robinson enough new material to make Charlie particularly distinctive.
But Robinson is a very good actor, and he manages to find enough charm and vulnerability in the guy that you can at least understand why Harper fell in love with him. He makes Charlie more interesting than Charlie is on the page.
Emilia Jones is even better.
I've liked Jones for years, and of course she was terrific in CODA, but she is also in Tony, which came out last month and, as I'm writing this, is my favorite movie of the year so far. If you haven't seen Tony, see it. Jones is outstanding in that movie, and she continues to prove that she is an enormously talented actress.
She's terrific here, too.
Harper could easily have become just "the controlling girlfriend," because that's basically how the screenplay constructs her during certain stretches. Jones gives her considerably more shading than that.
You can see the affection underneath the frustration. You understand why she wants Charlie to get his shit together, and you can also see the point where helping someone begins turning into trying to control who they become.
Robinson and Jones have enough chemistry that I occasionally found myself wishing Eldridge and Dean would simply stop directing them so aggressively.
Put the camera on these two people. Let them talk. Let them fight. Let them be quiet. Trust them. They're actors. They're good at this.
Instead, the movie keeps imposing itself on the relationship, constantly reminding us that we're watching a carefully constructed nonlinear examination of memory. You don't have to take the story apart and put it back together like a jigsaw puzzle to make it meaningful.
Eldridge and Dean have written films before, including Carolina Caroline, another movie I thought was derivative, a kind of Bonnie and Clyde road-movie riff that had some interesting moments and one particularly good scene but never became anything especially memorable.
With Charlie Harper, they seem determined to establish themselves as serious cinematic stylists, but the technique feels imposed on the material rather than emerging naturally from it.
There's also the title. Charlie Harper.
For anyone who watched Two and a Half Men, that name is going to sound VERY familiar because Charlie Sheen's character on that show was Charlie Harper. This movie has absolutely nothing to do with Two and a Half Men. Nothing. It doesn't reference the show or acknowledge the connection. It's just called Charlie Harper.
That's bizarre.
Charlie Harper has two talented actors giving the material considerably more life than it deserves. Nick Robinson finds humanity in a familiar self-destructive character, and Emilia Jones continues to demonstrate what a terrific actress she is.
When the movie simply allows the two of them to interact, there are moments when you can see the better, simpler relationship drama hiding underneath everything else. But the filmmakers don't trust it.
They take a story that has been told many times before and apparently decide the way to make it fresh is to fracture the timeline, switch aspect ratios, change visual textures and dress relatively conventional material in cinematic tricks. The result isn't profound. It's distracting.
Charlie Harper is a disappointing, pretentious and ultimately mediocre relationship drama rescued from being completely forgettable by Nick Robinson and, especially, Emilia Jones.
They're worth watching.
The movie around them isn't. - ⭐️1/2
Sometimes a movie that doesn't get made leads to something much more interesting.
Director Bassam Tariq and Mahershala Ali were, for a long time, supposed to make Marvel's new version of Blade, the vampire superhero previously played by Wesley Snipes in three movies. That project went through all kinds of problems, Tariq eventually left it, and the version they were going to make together fell apart.
But Tariq and Ali still wanted to work together, and out of the ruins of that Marvel project comes Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother, an original movie written and directed by Tariq and starring Ali.
And considering my feelings about the endless parade of comic-book movies, I think we got the better deal.
Instead of another Marvel movie, we have this strange, thoughtful, violent, sometimes funny and beautifully made action drama about faith, masculinity, fatherhood, grief and the enormous hole left in a family when its mother is suddenly gone.
It has sword fights and assassins and religious fanatics with automatic weapons, but it also has long conversations about Islam, children questioning their father, a desperate search for breast milk and Mahershala Ali sitting quietly behind the wheel of a car wondering what the hell he's supposed to believe anymore.
I'll take that over another superhero movie any day.
Ali plays Latif, a devout Muslim living in Houston who also happens to be a professional hitman. He's an assassin with a code, a quiet guy who uses a sword and physical force and apparently believes that the people he kills deserve to be removed from the world.
That's already a pretty fascinating contradiction: a deeply religious man whose profession violates virtually everything his faith tells him about how to live.
The movie immediately throws us into that contradiction. It opens with Latif carrying out a reasonably brutal hit in a public restroom, and while this violence is happening, he receives the news that his wife has died. Suddenly he's alone with three children: teenage daughter Fatiha, his younger son Qadir and infant daughter Aziza.
And the baby can't tolerate ordinary formula.
So Latif's immediate problem isn't another assassin or some giant criminal conspiracy. It's breast milk.
That sounds like the setup for some incredibly stupid action comedy, but Tariq takes it seriously, and the search becomes one of the smartest things in the movie. Latif goes from hospitals to milk banks to relatives, desperately trying to get a prescription and locate milk that his daughter can actually consume. He runs into bureaucratic obstacles. Places are closed. He can't get what he needs.
Eventually this devout Muslim assassin finds himself entering environments that couldn't be further removed from the life he wants to lead, including a reformed church where a lactating sex worker may be able to help him.
The premise gets increasingly outrageous, but Mahershala Ali keeps the entire thing grounded.
Ali is one of those actors who doesn't need to do very much to command the screen. He can be completely still and you see everything happening behind his eyes. Latif is grieving, terrified, exhausted and increasingly desperate, but he's also trying to maintain authority over his children and pretend that he has some idea what he's doing.
He doesn't. His daughter Fatiha, played by Adia, knows that.
Adia is fantastic in this movie. In fact, it's one of the best performances I've seen from a young actor this year. Fatiha is a teenager challenging her father, questioning aspects of her religion, exploring things online that her father would definitely prefer she NOT be exploring, and increasingly realizing that there are enormous parts of Latif's life that have been hidden from her.
His son Qadir, played by Jahleel Kamara, is wrestling with faith in a different way. One of my favorite scenes happens after Latif himself has begun seriously questioning the purpose of prayer.
Qadir asks why they aren't praying, and an angry Latif pulls the car over and basically tells him that if he wants to pray so badly, go ahead and pray. The boy gets out of the car and does exactly that. Then his sister joins him.
It's a beautiful scene because the children are simultaneously rebelling against their father and embracing the faith he helped instill in them. That's the kind of contradiction the movie understands.
There's another terrific little moment when the kids are watching First Blood, the original Sylvester Stallone Rambo movie, while remaining almost completely unaware that their father is essentially living his own violent action movie.
Latif comes in and tells them to shut it off and do their studies. It's funny, but it also captures the bizarre compartmentalization of his life. Dad doesn't want the kids watching Rambo while Dad is out cutting people up with a sword.
Parenting is complicated.
Meanwhile, Latif is trying to get out of the assassination business, which, as anyone who has ever watched a movie about professional killers knows, is never as simple as submitting your two weeks' notice.
His former employer Mike, played by Laith Nakli, wants one more job. Of course he does. That job eventually involves Pastor Kwan, played by John Cho, and Cho is absolutely terrific here.
Yep, Harold from Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle is now playing a terrifying religious fanatic with wild hair and a gold grill, surrounded by heavily armed followers who are perfectly willing to spread the gospel by blowing people away.
Cho is creepy, unpredictable and genuinely chilling. There's something slightly unhinged in his performance from the moment he appears, and I loved watching him play this kind of character.
Then there's Hattie, played by Abubakr Ali, and he practically steals the movie every time he shows up. Hattie is weird, funny, disturbing and somehow enormously entertaining, a guy connected to a pornography operation who becomes one of the catalysts bringing all these criminal and religious worlds together.
Latif eventually kidnaps him, zip-ties him in the back seat of the car and drags him along while trying to deal with everything else in his life. The scenes between them are great.
There's an especially good sequence where Latif, still holding Hattie hostage, takes him into a restaurant to meet his children. They sit there having this strange, funny and unexpectedly serious conversation about what it actually means to be a Muslim and what it means to live a good life, while all the criminal machinery surrounding them keeps moving closer. Then Pastor Kwan arrives and everything gets considerably more complicated.
Giancarlo Esposito is also excellent as Abdul Malik, the leader of the mosque the family attends. The scenes inside the mosque are treated with real seriousness and respect. Islam isn't simply being used as exotic window dressing or as an easy source of conflict. The movie is genuinely interested in what faith means when the person practicing it is living a life that fundamentally contradicts it.
Latif wants his children to remain faithful to the traditions he and his wife taught them. But what authority does he have to demand that when he's murdering people for money?
That's a much more interesting conflict than whether he can win a sword fight. Although the sword fights are pretty damn good, too.
Tariq is a talented action director. There are several terrific hand-to-hand combat sequences, including an intense scene when Mike and another man break into Latif's apartment and he takes them on with a sword. What makes the sequence particularly effective is what happens afterward, when Fatiha walks in and sees enough to understand what her father really does.
The action and family drama suddenly become the same story.
The film eventually builds toward a large confrontation involving Pastor Kwan, and Tariq stages the violence with real force. The cinematography is beautiful, the editing is sharp, and the action generally feels physical rather than weightless.
There were a few moments when I thought the camera became unnecessarily flashy. There are shots where the image suddenly flips upside down or the horizon is turned on its side, and I could have done without that LOOK AT THIS CAMERA MOVE stuff, but thankfully it doesn't dominate the movie.
There are several obvious influences here. I could feel Jim Jarmusch's Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, particularly in the idea of a modern assassin living according to a spiritual code that doesn't comfortably coexist with his profession.
There's some Lone Wolf and Cub and Shogun Assassin in the mixture of parenthood and violent warrior mythology, and inevitably there's a little John Wick in the modern hitman material.
But Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother has enough of its own identity that those influences never overwhelmed it for me.
The title tells you what really matters.
This isn't ultimately a movie about killing Pastor Kwan or completing one final job. It's about the absence of a mother. It's about maternal power and the thousand things a mother does inside a family that aren't completely understood until she's suddenly not there anymore.
Latif loves his children, and he's willing to kill or die protecting them, but that doesn't mean he knows how to become what they've lost. He can't simply take his wife's place. Nobody can.
The breast milk becomes both a completely practical problem (this baby has to eat) and an obvious symbol of what Latif cannot provide. He can use a sword. He can take down a room full of killers. He can survive things most people couldn't. But he can't give his infant daughter the one thing she physically needs from her mother.
That's a powerful image, and the movie earns it.
The final section does push credibility pretty far. I'm not going to give away what happens, but the last 15 minutes require you to accept things that probably would not unfold this way in anything resembling reality. Normally that kind of thing can lose me completely.
Here, I went with it.
The ending works much better symbolically than logically, because Tariq is bringing together everything the movie has been exploring: faith, motherhood, grief, fatherhood, violence, forgiveness and the possibility of creating a family after the center of that family has disappeared.
If you start diagramming the practical reality of what happens, you're going to have questions. I certainly did. But emotionally, I understood exactly what Tariq was reaching for, and Ali sells it.
Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother occasionally gets outrageous, occasionally gets too flashy and eventually stretches reality about as far as it can go. But Mahershala Ali holds it together with another beautifully controlled performance, and he's surrounded by an unusually strong cast.
John Cho is wonderfully creepy, Giancarlo Esposito brings enormous gravity to the religious material, Abubakr Ali is hilarious and mesmerizing, and Adia is a real discovery.
This is an action movie with something on its mind. It's interested in religion without mocking it, masculinity without glorifying it, violence without pretending it has no consequences, and motherhood without reducing it to sentimental speeches.
And somehow it also manages to be exciting.
So yes, I'm glad that version of Blade fell apart. Because instead of another comic-book reboot, Bassam Tariq and Mahershala Ali gave us something original, strange, challenging and deeply personal.
Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother works as an action film, a family drama, a study of faith and a showcase for some terrific performances.
I'm highly recommending it. - ⭐️⭐️⭐️1/2
I grew up in the 1970s, and when I was a kid, one of my heroes (and one of the heroes of pretty much every boy I knew) was Evel Knievel. And I specifically say the 1970s because only in the 1970s could someone as completely ridiculous as Evel Knievel become a genuine American cultural icon.
The guy dressed like Elvis Presley crossed with Captain America, rode motorcycles over trucks and buses, broke practically every bone in his body, and eventually tried to blast himself across the Snake River Canyon in a rocket. His first name sounded like "evil." His last name rhymed with evil. He had a cape. He was constantly getting hurt.
I thought he was the coolest human being alive.
Whenever Evel Knievel appeared on ABC's Wide World of Sports or had one of his big television specials, I was mesmerized. I had the Evel Knievel wind-up motorcycle toy. I had T-shirts. I watched the movie where George Hamilton played him, and I even watched the movie where Evel played himself.
It wasn't until I was in my late teens that I began thinking, "Wait a minute. This guy might actually be kind of an idiot."
What Evel Knievel did wasn't necessarily courageous. A lot of it was just unbelievably reckless. But he was perfect for the era. Growing up in the '70s, we watched some weird shit, and Evel Knievel fit beautifully into a decade when the air seemed permanently filled with pot smoke, beer and Riunite Lambrusco.
What I didn't know was that, just north of us, Canada had its own Evel Knievel. His name was Ken Carter.
He was known as "The Mad Canadian," and the entertaining new movie The Stunt Driver tells the strange, funny and ultimately tragic story of this regular Canadian guy who desperately wanted to become his country's answer to Evel Knievel. Specifically, it concentrates on Carter's insane, multi-year attempt to launch himself in a rocket-powered car across the St. Lawrence River.
Jay Baruchel plays Carter, and he's terrific.
The movie was written and directed by Michael Dowse and is based partly on the remarkable 1981 Canadian documentary The Devil at Your Heels, which chronicled Carter's efforts to pull off the jump.
In a clever touch, the documentary filmmakers themselves become characters in The Stunt Driver, so we're watching dramatizations of things that appeared in the actual documentary while also seeing what was happening around and behind that footage. And what was happening was frequently hilarious.
The basic problem with Ken Carter is that he really, really should not be doing this. He's middle-aged. He's already broken a bunch of bones. He's cross-eyed. He's scared. He's not particularly athletic. He can't swim, which seems like a significant issue when your big stunt involves launching yourself over a RIVER.
He doesn't even have a driver's license. This is the man who wants to become Canada's Evel Knievel.
But that's also what makes him such an appealing character. Carter isn't some fearless superhero. He's a broke, flawed, insecure guy who wants to accomplish something extraordinary. He wants to make money. He wants to impress his wife. He wants people to love him.
And he wants Canada to have its own daredevil hero instead of constantly looking south at this lunatic from Montana in the star-spangled jumpsuit.
Carter teams up with rocket engineer Dick Keller, played by Ed Helms, and they begin the enormous process of constructing the ramp, building the rocket car, finding financial backing, attracting publicity and somehow convincing everyone (including themselves) that this might actually work.
It doesn't go smoothly.
There are money problems, engineering problems, weather problems, personality conflicts, test jumps, nervous sponsors and endless delays. Carter himself repeatedly discovers reasons why perhaps today isn't the ideal day to risk turning his skeleton into gravel.
Baruchel is very funny in these scenes because he doesn't play Carter as stupid. He's sincere. He genuinely wants to do this. He also understandably does not want to die.
There's a wonderful sequence where Carter reluctantly agrees to perform a test jump but doesn't have his flame-retardant suit, so he's forced to squeeze himself into a much smaller suit belonging to another driver.
Watching Baruchel desperately try to stuff himself into this thing is very funny, but it also tells you everything about the homemade nature of the entire operation. This isn't NASA.
At one point the crew desperately needs cash to pay for fuel, and when somebody finally arrives carrying bags of money, Carter thinks the bags contain takeout chicken. He's hungry. He's excited about the chicken. Sorry, Ken. It's financing.
There are also little conversations happening around the edges of scenes that made me laugh, including a completely ridiculous discussion about guinea pigs as pets that eventually turns into the realization that Carter himself is essentially the guinea pig in this entire experiment. Listen to the background dialogue in this movie. There's funny stuff everywhere.
Ed Helms is especially good as Keller. For much of the movie he's working in the familiar Helms territory of the increasingly exasperated guy surrounded by chaos, but during the final 20 minutes he gets to do something considerably more emotional, and he's excellent.
His relationship with Carter becomes one of the film's strongest elements because you gradually understand why all these people continue helping this man even when they know how completely insane the project has become. They like him. Ken Carter is a goofball, but he's THEIR goofball.
Then there's Evel Knievel himself, played by Ben Foster, and Foster is spectacular. He's only in the movie briefly, but he looks like Evel, sounds like Evel and completely captures that gigantic ego and peculiar charisma.
The tension between Knievel and Carter is very funny because Carter simultaneously idolizes this guy and desperately wants to beat him.
At one point things nearly turn into a fistfight, and Carter announces, "Let's make breakfast."
Knievel has absolutely no idea what the hell he's talking about. Apparently, in Carter's particular Canadian vocabulary, this means we're going to fight. It's a terrific little moment, and Foster's baffled reaction is priceless.
Laurence Leboeuf is also excellent as Carter's wife Gloria, who understands her husband better than anyone. She knows he's afraid. She knows he's in over his head. She knows he's risking his life for a combination of money, fame, pride and some desperate need to prove that he's not the loser everybody thinks he is. Their marriage gives the movie its emotional center.
Carter isn't simply trying to become famous. He wants to provide for Gloria. He wants her to believe in him. He wants to become the man he has spent years telling everybody he already is.
That's where The Stunt Driver becomes something more than a funny movie about a crazy Canadian trying to jump a river. It's an underdog story about a guy whose biggest obstacle isn't the St. Lawrence River. It's Ken Carter.
The central stunt took years to prepare, and without giving away every detail of how it unfolded, Carter ultimately did not perform the jump himself. Another driver took his place and was horribly injured when the stunt failed. Carter continued performing afterward, and the movie follows him into the early 1980s, when another stunt eventually killed him.
But Dowse never turns Carter into either a saint or a pathetic joke. He understands the absurdity of the guy while remaining genuinely affectionate toward him.
That makes sense coming from the filmmaker who made Goon, which also starred Baruchel. Goon is easily Dowse's best movie and, for my money, one of the greatest hockey movies ever made, second only to Slap Shot.
That movie also understood something about specifically Canadian forms of heroism: working-class guys who aren't necessarily brilliant or conventionally heroic but find meaning in doing something incredibly difficult, painful and occasionally stupid.
The Stunt Driver isn't as good as Goon, and it owes quite a bit to The Devil at Your Heels, but you can feel a similar affection here.
The period recreation is also outstanding. The production design, art direction, costumes, hair and makeup completely capture the mid-to-late '70s and early '80s without making it feel like modern actors attending a 1970s costume party.
That's harder than it sounds. A lot of period movies turn into cosplay: LOOK! BIG SIDEBURNS! BELL-BOTTOMS! This actually feels lived-in.
The ramps, cars, clothes, television crews, machinery and general low-budget insanity of Carter's operation have an authenticity that helps enormously, especially when the movie recreates moments from the documentary.
It feels like these people really are standing around in the middle of nowhere trying to determine whether launching a Canadian guy who can't swim across a major body of water in a rocket car is financially feasible.
The answer, incidentally, should probably have been no. But then we wouldn't have a movie.
The ending is particularly effective. Gloria watches footage Carter recorded for her in case one of his stunts went wrong, and knowing where his life ultimately leads gives the scene a lovely, bittersweet quality. It's funny how a movie can spend so much time laughing at someone's ridiculous dream and still leave you genuinely moved by the fact that he never stopped chasing it.
Ken Carter was never Evel Knievel. That's sort of the point.
He was a broke Canadian underdog living in the enormous shadow of an American celebrity, trying to convince himself and everybody around him that he belonged in the same conversation. He was scared, unqualified, stubborn and frequently ridiculous.
He was also sincere.
Baruchel understands that distinction and gives Carter real humanity without sanding away any of his foolishness. Helms is funny and eventually quite moving, Foster is hilarious and nearly steals the movie in a handful of scenes, and Leboeuf gives the film much of its heart.
The Stunt Driver is funny, affectionate, sad and very Canadian. It's a movie about ambition exceeding ability, about wanting desperately to be somebody, and about the strange people who continue believing in you even when your dream involves a rocket-powered automobile, a giant river and a truly alarming absence of common sense.
I had a really good time with it. And after spending my childhood worshipping Evel Knievel, I'm glad I finally got to meet the Mad Canadian. - ⭐️⭐️⭐️
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