On legendary talents: RIP, Rob Reiner

On December 15, 2025 By Luther M. SilerIn moviesLeave a comment

I have never seen “The Wolf of Wall Street”. And yet, somehow, this is one of my favorite scenes in all of film, and I have most of it memorized. And it is damn near entirely due to Rob Reiner’s performance. My understanding is that most of the sequence was improvised, and Reiner is utterly breaking everyone in the room. The only one who can keep up with him is Jonah Hill, who is obviously cracking– you will never convince me that the laughing is acting– and the needling he’s directing towards Reiner just keeps winding him up more and more. DiCaprio is trying his damnedest to play the straight man in the scene, and he can’t hold it together either. I love every second of this scene, and I love it in a way that made me love Rob Reiner as an actor.

I don’t talk about it much, and I haven’t watched it in quite some time, but Stand by Me was one of my favorite movies as a kid. I was 10 when it came out, just a bit younger than the characters and a touch younger still than the actors playing them, but I’m willing to believe if I put it on right now I could still do a significant amount of the dialogue along with the movie.

The line “Suck my fat one, you cheap dime-store hood” (and River’s underrated “Whoever toldja you had a fat one, Lachance?” a few moments later) is going to be stuck in my head until I die. I’ve probably seen the film a couple dozen times.

And then there’s The Princess Bride, a movie that I have seen even more times than I’ve seen Stand by Me, an absolutely fucking immortal movie.(*)

I wish it was more common to realize the effect that a stranger has had on your life before they pass away, particularly when someone passes away in as tragic and hideous a way as Rob and Michele Reiner did. I’m generally not especially pressed by the idea of meeting celebrities (although I did meet Mandy Patinkin once, speaking of Princess Bride, and yes, I made him say The Line) but damn, the chance to tell Rob Reiner thank you is an opportunity I’m deeply saddened to have missed.

May his memory be a blessing.

(*) There is talk about doing a remake of this movie, which I thought was a horrendous idea until today, when I suddenly realized how to do it right: you must cast Fred Savage in the role of the parent reading the book, and he’s reading it to his own son or daughter(**) as they’re home sick, and you make it very clear that Savage is playing the same character as an adult. This neatly provides for new casting as well as any updates or changes the new director might decide to make to the story– it’s someone new hearing it, and we’re seeing their imagination and their interpretation, not Savage’s.

(**) Not to be too gender essentialist about it, but I kind of love the idea of a girl rolling her eyes at the fight scenes the same way The Grandson does at the kissing.

In which I started with Pong

On October 8, 2025October 8, 2025 By Luther M. SilerIn video gamesLeave a comment

I’ve been playing Ghost of Yotei during my scant free time lately— it’s kind of nuts how busy the last couple of weeks have been, now that I think of it– and so far, about ten hours in, it’s at least the equal of Ghost of Tsushima, its predecessor, one of the best games I’ve ever played. If you go look at my review of Tsushima, you’ll notice I keep harping on how amazing the facial animation is– and, yes, I used the same line about Pong, which will keep being relevant until I stop playing video games.

I hit a moment last night that absolutely floored me, to the point where I decided I needed to be done playing for the night because there was no way anything else I was going to do in that session was going to top it. I’m going to dance around some spoilers, but I’ll do my best to be as ambiguous as possible.

There is a moment in the game where a character encounters another character who they believed was dead. And there is a good three or four seconds where you realize what is going on before either of the characters speak, just from the look in the eyes of the character realizing what is going on. Their eyes moisten, just a little bit, and the look that crawls across their face is this amazing and perfectly readable mix of disbelief, joy, relief and shame, and it is quite simply the most complex emotional moment I have ever seen a digital character convey in my entire life.

(To be clear, that’s a random screenshot above. I found some online that were from right around the moment I’m talking about and decided not to use them to avoid even that much of a spoiler.)

And this is just ten hours in. I’m sure there is more to come. That said, Sucker Punch, if you fuckers kill my horse again after what you did to me in Tsushima, we’re gonna have a problem.

#REVIEW: Abigail (2024)

On May 27, 2024May 27, 2024 By Luther M. SilerIn movies, Reviews1 Comment

ABIGAIL is one of those movies that technically has a big twist, but if you’re aware of the movie at all, all of the marketing, including the trailers, has spoiled the shit out of that big twist already, and it happens early enough in the film that the twist is kind of also the premise, which makes it hard to talk about. So this sentence will serve as the spoiler-free review: Abigail is kind of a failure as a horror movie– I am bad at horror movies, and I have been since I became a father, and I was never scared. It is, however, a pretty damn effective, predictable but wildly entertaining horror-adjacent action/slasher film, and all in all I’m going to recommend it, so long as you go in with the proper expectations. Expect something closer to From Dusk Till Dawn than to The Exorcist or Paranormal Activity and you’ll be fine.

So, yeah. Spoilers from here out, although once you know the premise, you already know the broad strokes of the movie.

Alisha Weir, am I right? I haven’t seen a child actor this effective since Season 1 of Stranger Things Millie Bobby Brown, and I really don’t think Millie has ever had a role that allowed her to cut loose the way Weir gets to in this movie. Millie has never gotten a line as iconic as “I’m sorry for what’s going to happen to you.” But let’s back up and talk about the actual movie: Abigail starts off as a heist movie, as a group of criminals kidnap a little girl from a massive mansion and then, rather inexplicably, spirit her off to a similarly massive but much older and creepier mansion out in the middle of nowhere, where Giancarlo Esposito tells them to wait with the girl for 24 hours, during which time he’ll extract a $50 million ransom from her father, which they can all split and then be off on their separate ways.

Only, oops, the little girl is a vampire, and, well, it doesn’t go great for them. This plan has some flaws even before you get to the vampire, and my wife called another minor twist early on– all of the kidnappers have screwed over this little girl’s vampire crime lord father at some point or another, and she’s managed to bring them all here so she can hunt and kill them. Two of them die before it’s immediately clear what’s going on, and the reactions of the rest to being hunted by an actual vampire are kind of hilarious. Eventually the main female character survives, blah blah blah, you know how this is going to go.

This movie rides on the strength of its atmosphere and its characters, and the house is effectively creepy, Amelia’s penchant for tossing ballet moves into her fighting style and her hunting (watching her tiptoe across a stairway bannister on her way to try and kill somebody is impressively fucked up; her movement and physicality throughout the movie is excellently done) and the gore level is turned up to 15; the number of bodies and/or body parts that literally explode in this movie is … significant.

And, again, the characters are fun, if broadly drawn; the ex-undercover cop turned criminal, the dim-bulb Quebecois muscle guy, the e-girl hacker, and the Main Character With a Dark Past, along with an ex-marine and a druggie wheelman, plus Giancarlo fucking Esposito, who has never in his life not elevated anything he was in. The biggest problem with the movie is that everyone in it looks like someone more famous than them; the Quebecker looks like Elon Musk, the hacker looks like Winona Ryder circa Beetlejuice, the ex-cop is Not Ryan Gosling, and the druggie is basically playing the exact same character he played in Euphoria, which I guess isn’t quite the same thing but it’s still kinda weird. They all bounce off of each other nicely and most of them get at least a couple of cool moments here and there to chew some scenery of their own. I mean, this moment here. I love it:

The house itself is straight out of Resident Evil, and I mean it as a compliment when I say this movie would make a great video game, although it kind of already did, except with a little ballerina girl instead of nine-and-a-half-foot-tall Lady Dimitrescu. The scenery is great, the pool scene is horrifying, the ‘plosions are gross, the characters are fun, and at least some of the acting is absolutely phenomenal. Again, it’s not scary, so don’t go in wanting that, but I’m really glad we actually sat down and watched this last night. I don’t watch many movies any more so I like to be able to recommend them when I do. Two thumbs up.

Come to Jesus

On January 20, 2024 By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

This looks terrible, I know, but the genuine truth is that it happens at the beginning of nearly every quarter, nearly every year. We are about to start the third week of the third quarter. At the end of a quarter kids get used to the idea that no one assignment is going to have a huge impact on their grades. Then they forget how averages work and suddenly they’ve missed one assignment and bam all by itself they’re down to a D or an F, because there have only been two or three assignments that went into the grade book in week two of the quarter.

And one of the things people don’t realize about teaching is just how much acting is involved. Because I know exactly what’s going on here, and I know it’s going to get fixed, but did I begin every single non-Algebra class with a five-minute “Fix this or I will end you” lecture? One where I demonstrated that if I want to terrify my students my most effective tool is not to yell at them but, rather, to lower my voice? Did I use the word “pathetic” a whole lot more often on Friday than I usually do in a typical day, much less a typical week?(*) Yep. Sure did, to all those things, and not a single peep was uttered by 96% of my students (actually, let’s do the math, since I bounced three kids to the office during the lectures … ninety-eight percent) during any of it, because in stark contrast to most of my previous schools, very few of these kids have ever seen me genuinely pissed.

Which, uh, I wasn’t.

But I’m good at this, so believe me, they didn’t know.

I’d say a third of those kids got their grades up to passing during their math classes on Friday, and another third will be up to snuff by the end of the weekend. The rest will require some more individual work. But most of my classes this year haven’t had more than one or two kids failing, and I’ve seen more than one, miraculously, where at the end of the quarter every single student was passing. So they’ll fix it. And then fourth quarter I’ll have to scare the shit out of them all over again.

(*) I have never described an individual student as “pathetic,” just for the record. I have used that word to describe specific work outputs, however, and I’m entirely comfortable with using it to describe the current grades of an entire class.

In which I am fat and grouchy

On December 20, 2022 By Luther M. SilerIn lifeLeave a comment

Just got back from a performance at my kid’s school, made up entirely of fifth and sixth graders, that the drama teacher decided to call a “cabaret,” which put me not so much in mind of things starring fifth and sixth graders. There were puppet shows and speeches and some sort of weirdly avant-garde and possibly partially improvised performance that really had me wondering if I should be snapping my fingers rather than clapping at the end of each part of it.

Meanwhile, my ass still hurts from the chair. I have a fairly ample ass. No chair should be able to do this to me, but at one point during the performance I’m pretty sure I was paralyzed from the waist down. I had my arm around my wife, because they pack those damn chairs so close together that I didn’t have room for my shoulders otherwise, and that was falling asleep too, and … it wasn’t pleasant.

My kid’s puppet show about Icarus and Daedalus was pretty okay, though, especially when they managed to work the “Father, Help” meme into it. Raised that boy right, I have.

CPAP update: I continue to be unable to use the nasal pillows, and my “events” have stabilized around six an hour; still more than they want (the target is less than five) but way less than eighty. I must admit after three days of waking up feeling reasonably energetic (still nothing earthshaking, mind you, but three good night’s sleeps) I was dying on the drive in to work today. I have today and tomorrow and then I have a couple of weeks where I can sleep in. Everything will be fine. I can do this.

On Season 3 of THE BOYS

On June 6, 2022June 13, 2022 By Luther M. SilerIn Reviews, TelevisionLeave a comment

This will be the third time I have written about Amazon Prime’s series The Boys, based on the Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson comic book of the same name, in this space. The first piece I wrote about it started with a content warning for “everything,” and mainly talked about the fact that I thought the show was problematic as hell, leaning way too much into sexism and rape and fridging female characters than anything I could be comfortable with recommending, but … well … if you could get past that awfulness, there was a pretty good show in there, somehow?

Then Season 2 rolled around, and they’d shed most of Ennis’ bullshit from the first season, in general treating their female characters a lot better, not relying on rape as a driver of the plot at all, and still keeping the insanely hyperviolent and raunchy tone of the first season, which moved the show from “Eh, if you were curious already, check it out, but don’t pay for Amazon Prime for this” to “Well, don’t pay for Amazon Prime just for this, but if you already have it, you probably ought to watch an episode or two and see what you think.”

We are, as of right now, three episodes into Season 3; my understanding is that new episodes are going to drop on Friday, although I’m not 100% sure what the actual schedule is– in other words, I’m not sure if they gave us three episodes to start and there will be 3 more this Friday, or if it’ll be on a more traditional one-episode-a-week schedule, or what, but we’re three episodes in. The season isn’t finished.

But based on those three episodes, and continuing to keep in mind that this show is not for everyone, and that I really can’t emphasize enough how much bodies literally exploding into chunky red sauce has been a part of this season, and there was a sequence in the first episode that very nearly had me hiding behind the couch …

I know Amazon Prime is $129 a year now, but … yeah, you need to be watching The Boys, if your constitution can handle it. If you know you can’t, go in peace and ignore this. But if you can?

This show has some of the best acting I have ever seen on a TV screen. Antony Starr as the Homelander is absolutely fucking terrifying in a way that I have never seen in a television character before. Like, my heart rate shoots up whenever he’s on screen. I want him to play the Joker so badly I can taste it. Karl Urban is amazing. Giancarlo Esposito is amazing. Jack Quaid is amazing. Erin Moriarty and Chance Crawford and Jessie Usher and oh my God Colby Minifie are amazing. Everyone with a role on this show is doing the job of their lives.

(Discovers that Mesmer, from last season, was Haley Joel fucking Osment, and has to take a moment.)

I really cannot express enough how much you need to see the clinic that Antony Starr is putting on here, though, managing to marry being an angry, unstable god with somebody who was very clearly so broken as a child that you almost feel sorry for him. Until, of course, you realize he’s fantasizing about killing every living person in New York City in the same disconnected, unconcerned way you might think for half a second before stepping on a bug. But you can see the scared little kid in him, and it’s just so good. And the writers, who are continuing to do adaptations The Right Way, have made it so clear that this show doesn’t even vaguely understand the concept of Plot Armor that there is literally not a single second where this man is on screen where you’re not worried about him doing something terrible at any moment. It’s been years since I had to take time to calm down after watching a TV show, and we’re only three episodes into this season and they’ve done it to me three times.

So, yeah. There’s still plenty of time for shit to go wrong, but at this point, and without relinquishing any of the previous warnings attached to previous seasons, this show is moving to You Need To Be Watching This. I’ll update again once the season is over.

#REVIEW: Peacemaker, Season One

On February 20, 2022 By Luther M. SilerIn Reviews, Television1 Comment

So. Um.

I gotta admit; I’m really surprised to be writing any of this. I’ve seen … four James Gunn projects, I think? The two Guardians of the Galaxy movies and his Suicide Squad movie, which introduced Peacemaker as a character. I understand he’s in the comic books; if I’ve ever encountered him there, I don’t recall it. Most of Gunn’s projects have landed in the same spot in my head: that was entertaining, and I’m done thinking about it now. He tends to over-rely on music to drive his emotional beats forward, which it turns out is way more annoying if you’re watching with closed captions on so that all the lyrics appear on the screen, but that’s not a huge thing and it’s literally my only general gripe about his work.

Peacemaker is the best thing he’s ever done, and it’s not close, and — and this is the part where I’m really surprised to be writing this– it’s mostly because of John Cena’s literally unbelievable, as in “I don’t believe he’s really this good,” acting talents. I don’t know much about Cena, really; I know he (used to be?) a pro wrestler but that’s not something I really follow, and he made no particular impact on me in The Suicide Squad. But his charisma and his incredibly malleable face carry this show. I think the best thing to compare him to is Ryan Reynolds in Deadpool; it is so obvious that he loves playing this character that his enthusiasm is infectious and it carries through on every frame of the show that he’s in. He is not exactly surrounded by acting slouches– the only two I’m familiar with are Robert Patrick who has a grand old time playing Peacemaker’s racist-as-fuck evil supervillain father and the awesome Danielle Brooks playing Leota Adebayo, otherwise known as Amanda Waller’s daughter, but everybody is doing solid work here. Freddie Stroma, whose real name is Frederic Wilhelm C.J. Sjöström, is a particular standout as Vigilante, a character I’d be perfectly happy to see another spinoff for.

But back to Cena. He is playing a big dumb douchebag, and that’s probably being kind to the character. But he manages to play the big dumb douchebag in such a compelling fashion that not rooting for him is inconceivable, and he’s in control of himself enough that every time Peacemaker feels the slightest twitch of an emotion you pick up on it. I don’t think that I’ve ever said this about an actor before, but the ways he uses his eyes and his mouth to convey emotion are just amazing. I know that probably sounds weird, but watch the show. I swear, he’s doing something different here, and to find this performance in the middle of this violent, profane, shouty middle-school testosterone-fest of a comic book show is really something special. It’s getting to be very rare for me to make it through any kind of TV or movie nowadays; I regularly will watch an episode or two of something, proclaim it to be something I really like, and then never watch it again– so the fact that I was eagerly looking forward to watching the entire season is really worth reinforcing. If you have HBO Max, definitely check this out, and if you don’t have HBO Max, if you have any other reason to pick the service up for a month, go for it.

On HAMILTON

On March 8, 2018March 8, 2018 By Luther M. SilerIn life, Music6 Comments

Ask me to name my heroes and two names will come to mind very quickly: Malcolm X and Abraham Lincoln. I’m always interested to see how fast people catch the fundamental similarity between the two men: they’re both damn near entirely self-educated. I’ve had more than my share of formal education but in a lot of the things I find important I’m an autodidact, and it’s a quality I deeply respect in people.

Which explains my attraction to Alexander Hamilton, or at least the version of him that Lin-Manuel Miranda has created in HAMILTON. I mean, the fundamentals of the story are basically correct, and Hamilton is undoubtedly a supreme autodidact, but he’s not quite up there with my heroes mostly because, while I’ve read tons of speeches and writings by Malcolm X and Abraham Lincoln, I’ve mostly read stuff about Hamilton, and that represents an important difference to me. At least at the moment. I need to reread the Federalist papers sometime.

But, yeah. This guy? I wanna be this guy:

How do you write like you’re running out of time?
Write day and night like you’re running out of time?
How do you write like tomorrow won’t arrive?
How do you write like you need it to survive?
How do you write every second you’re alive?

I wish, y’all. I don’t write enough, and the feeling “I don’t write enough” has been a goddamn constant in my life basically since I left college despite the fact that I’ve had, at the very least, an active blog for for nearly that entire time. I don’t write enough, but I think about writing constantly. I am never happier than I am just after completing a written piece– distinctly happier than when I’m actually writing it, a sentiment I suspect most writers will recognize.

Writing is torture. Having written is the purest bliss. 🙂

Anyway. We went to see HAMILTON for our 10th anniversary a week ago and somehow I haven’t talked about it here yet. Walking in, I had large portions of the soundtrack memorized and my wife was at least reasonably familiar with the whole thing, and I think both of us were concerned that the cast being “wrong” might impair our enjoyment somewhat. I’m glad to report that that concern was basically nonsense; my wife actually walked out preferring the Chicago cast, or at least their voices. I wasn’t quite there, but I spent some time raving about the performance of Jonathan Kirkland, who plays George Washington. The guy’s physical presence is outstanding; he towers over the other actors in the show, and he does a tremendous job embodying someone who was so personally forbidding that Hamilton himself once actually made a bet with a fellow Constitutional Convention-goer about whether he was brave enough to slap him on the back. The “son” scene in Meet Me Inside was so much better than I’d thought it was going to be from the soundtrack. Washington just stares at Hamilton, and Hamilton folds like a cheap suit.

I mean, okay, not surprising that I liked seeing the most successful Broadway musical of my lifetime live, but still: I know the tickets are expensive, but if this show is near you? Go see it. It’s worth it.