The L’s are coming soon, but first, more movies watched out of proper alphabetical order…

Everybody Wants Some!! (2016)

This was written and directed by Richard Linklater, who has hell of a resumé — A Scanner Darkly, Apollo 10½, Before Midnight, Before Sunset, Before Sunrise, Bernie, Dazed and Confused, Fast Food Nation, etc. This one, though, I saw years ago and hated. Now it’s been suggested that it blew by me like a 95-mph fastball, so I watched it again, but whiffed again.

Jake is a new pitcher on his college baseball team. All the players share two frat houses, drink bottomless beer and smoke neverending doobie and laugh and laugh, and host wild parties with gorgeous babes. All female students at this college are gorgeous babes.

It’s a comedy, but every joke is boymen taunting each other with an edge of meanness, laughing about being high or horny. Anyone not a jock is not in on the jokes, and likely the butt.

I’ve been the outsider all my life, and nothing, nothing is un-funnier to me than a bunch of insiders joking among themselves, which is this movie’s entire concept. If I was anywhere with any of these characters, I’d want to be anywhere else.

After an hour of this, we’re shown a brief conversation with a hint of depth, but it promptly devolves into a punk version of the theme from Gilligan’s Island.

The film’s final twenty minutes are more interesting, as the players attend a party at a sorority, making them the visiting team instead of being on their home turf. Overall, though, it’s a thousand jokes that aren’t funny to me. Animal House without the laughs.

Verdict: STILL NO.

♦ ♦ ♦

Kingdom of Heaven (2005)

It’s comical and very human that the teachings of Christ, which add up to “Love one another,” became and remain a call for killing. And lordy, there’s plenty of killing here.

It’s 1184, in France and Jerusalem. The Crusades. Dudes wearing crosses on funky helmets go around killing other dudes, and women and children, all for the alleged glory of God, but more for the hell of it.

A great scene has two armies assembled on what’s sure to be a battlefield, but the leaders talk, and decide not to go to war. I don’t remember seeing that in a movie before.

Beyond that, though, Kingdom of Heaven got on my nerves. The leading man poses handsome for the camera, always looking movie-manly, but I’m a wimp and I could kick his ass. He falls for the Queen of Jerusalem, who’s movie-beautiful, always haughty, never human. Both stars were unfamiliar to me, so I looked ’em up, just to know who to avoid in other movies: Orlando Bloom and Eva Green.

A flock of far better actors — Brendan Gleeson, Jeremy Irons, Liam Neeson, Edward Norton, Michael Sheen, David Thewlis, more — have supporting roles with too little to do. Neeson is prominent in early scenes, then gone, beginning a disappointment that stretches more than three hours.

The huge battle scenes with primitive tech are slightly cool, but I never cared about anyone fighting or what they were fighting for.

Verdict: NO.

♦ ♦ ♦

Rampage (1963)

This is an odd safari movie, filmed on sets and at the zoo. Jack Hawkins plays “the hunter” and Robert Mitchum “the trapper,” teaming up to capture an “enchantress” — half tiger, half leopard — while also sparring over Hawkins’ lover half his age, Elsa Martinelli.

All aspects of this are silly, stale, or both, and there are a dozen ways to be offended if that’s your thing. The Technicolor is sharp, though, and Mitchum classes up the joint.

Very odd score by Elmer Bernstein, frequently sounding like the beginning of different 1950s rock songs, but without Bill Haley & The Comets.

Verdict: MAYBE.

♦ ♦ ♦

Zodiac (2007)

Always we’ve had serial killers, killing serially in American cities, but the so-called Zodiac Killer was out of the ordinary. He taunted cops and newspapers with cryptic coded clues, got away with murder, and inadvertently became the “brilliant killer” trope now so common in shitty books and movies.

This one’s not shitty. It’s a well-put-together mystery thriller, arguably solving the officially still-unsolved case. A few of the killings are re-enacted in early scenes, unnecessarily and violently, but queasy folks can fast-forward with nothing lost. Zodiac isn’t about the killings, it’s about the investigation.

Mark Ruffalo plays a cop who’s competent, wants to find the killer, but eventually has to move on to other cases. Robert Downey Jr is a reporter hot on the bad guy’s tail and bristling with wisecracks. Jake Gyllenhaal is the newspaper’s cartoonist, and you think he’s going to Woodward Downey’s Bernstein, but that’s not this movie.

After a few years, the murders are old news and the only person who’s still doggedly investigating is… the cartoonist. He eventually writes a book about the Zodiac Killer, and this movie is based on that book (Zodiac, by Robert Graysmith), so all the principal characters are real people.

Downey, Gyllenhaal, and Ruffalo are not old enough to remember the Zodiac panic, but I am. It was in all the papers, and I always read the news, even as a kid. I remember thinking, cities are crowded, people everywhere, so if some nutcase is killing random folks as a hobby, you’re mathematically safer in a big city than a small town. Maybe that was the beginning of what made me an urbanist.

The moviemakers did nifty work recreating San Francisco in the 1970s, but stumbled at the Northpoint Theatre, where Ruffalo’s cop and the Gyllenhal’s cartoonist attend a screening. The exterior is the right building (now a Goodwill), and they even got the interior gold curtains right, but the CGI-rebuilt marquee is all wrong. It was Northpoint, not North Point, and Theatre, not Theater, and that’s the 1990s marquee, not the more garish one the theatre sported in 1970s and ’80s photos. Sheesh.

Other than that colossal fuck-up, Zodiac is damned good.

Verdict: BIG YES.

10/31/2026

Logo illustration by Jeff Meyer.
— — —
If you can’t find a movie I’ve reviewed, or if you have recommendations, please drop me a note. And I mean it — if you ask, I will get you the movie.
— — —
No talking once the lights dim, and only real butter on the popcorn, not that fake yellow stuff.