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Mike Schulz, back from holiday, having seen no movies over the break, talks with Dave Levora and Darren Pitra about how “man-oh-man” good Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse was; about how the richness of the concept (infinite Spider-Men across an infinite multi-verse, each sharing special life circumstances that made their super-heroism possible) is matched by the eye-popping digital visual effects and the compelling voice-acting. “Favorite movie of the year?” asks one of the Deez. Continue reading June 15, 2023 Movie Mike on Planet 93.9 with Dave and Darren — “Transformers: Rise of the Beasts” and “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse” →

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Mike Schulz talks with Dave Levora and Darren Pitra about having missed Kandahar, but he may have dodged a bullet there; otherwise, he saw the majority of the movies discussed last week. About The Little Mermaid, one of The Deez laments the exclusion of the song “Les Poissons” from the remake, which he felt was the best song in the original. Though the film was not designed to be a “laugh riot,” as Schulz indicates, Rob Marshall’s 2023 remake did do better than either man in the studio could have foretold ($209.2 million on a $250 million budget, and expected to grow, grow, grow). Continue reading June 1, 2023 Movie Mike on Planet 93.9 with Dave and Darren — “The Little Mermaid,” “You Hurt My Feelings,” “The Starling Girl,” “About My Father,” and “The Machine” →

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Mike Schulz reflects with Dave Levora (the presence of Darren Pitra not in evidence) over his nearly-thirty-year-long writing stint as a film critic for the River Cities’ Reader (“the mid-Nineties were the worst. . . Forrest Gump has not aged well at all. . . I hate Bravehart; I really hate Bravehart”) before discussing Fast X, either the tenth or the eleventh installment in the Fast and the Furious franchise — eleven if you count the Hobbs and Shaw spin-off with Dwayne Johnson and Jason Statham. Continue reading May 25, 2023 Movie Mike on Planet 93.9 with Dave and Darren — “Fast X” and “Master Gardener” →

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Mike Schulz wants Dave Levora and Darren Pitra about Book Club: The Next Chapter, which he deems “a strange movie” because “it’s not really a movie”: There really isn’t a plot that makes sense or is in any way important. It sounds like it’s just an excuse to get Diane Keaton, Jane Fonda, Candice Bergen, and Mary Steenburgen back together to hang out in Italy and drink like Germans. There are a few wisps of narrative here and there, but nothing to indicate that there are any stakes; Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon’s Trip series of foodies-abroad films feel like the Fast and the Furious franchise. Continue reading May 18, 2023 Movie Mike on Planet 93.9 with Dave and Darren — “Book Club: The Next Chapter,” “Hypnotic,” and “BlackBerry” →

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Mike Schulz wants Dave Levora and Darren Pitra — and, by extension, everyone in the known universe — to know that he understands the appeal of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3: “It’s pushin’ buttons like crazy.” Understanding, however, is not the same thing as enjoying, and Schulz is one of the outliers who wasn’t responsible for Guardians overtaking Super Mario Bros as the N° 1 film. “[Guardians] was so aggressively pushy,” decrees Schulz, “[with] too much button-pushing.” He enjoyed the comedic touches, many of them furnished by Chris Pratt, Continue reading May 11, 2023 Movie Mike on Planet 93.9 with Dave and Darren — “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3” and “Love Again” →

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Mike Schulz talks with Dave Levora and Darren Pitra about his latest series of fives: Firstly, Big George Foreman, which was “pretty decent,” rather like Sweetwater, where the story itself is strong enough to carry the film forward, regardless of whatever lunacies — or, with your typical biopics, redundancies— a viewer encounters along the way. Khris Davis does a convincing job portraying Foreman, the oldest boxer to ever win the heavyweight championship, across two decades. As for the all-important Grill, director George Tillman Jr skipped a golden opportunity to anthropomorphize Foreman’s invention and make his biography into a buddy pic. Continue reading May 4, 2023 Movie Mike on Planet 93.9 with Dave and Darren — “Big George Foreman,” “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret.,” “Polite Society,” “Sisu,” and “Judy Blume Forever” →

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Mike Schulz talks with Dave Levora and Darren Pitra about his second week of fives — first, the dream logic of Ari Aster’s Beau is Afraid, “creepy, laugh-out-loud funny, and people are going to hate it.” Schulz loved the film, but thought it a narrative mess; and he suspects Aster doesn’t know how everything ties together, either. Second, there’s Lee Cronin’s Evil Dead Rise, which doesn’t feel like much thirty minutes in, but after that Continue reading April 27, 2023 Movie Mike on Planet 93.9 with Dave and Darren — “Beau is Afraid,” “Evil Dead Rise,” “Chevalier,” “Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant,” and “Somewhere in Queens” →

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Mike Schulz talks with Dave Levora and Darren Pitra about how the recent run of excellent films has come to an end — or, perhaps, sputtered to a temporary stop, awaiting fresh refills of petrol distillate. Schulz can’t give his heart to Renfield, ultimately, in spite of a top-notch performance by Nicolas Cage as Dracula, because of a stupid subplot, involving the New Orleans Mafia and a horribly-miscast Awkwafina as a straight-shooting cop, which manages to suck dry a rich and vital premise with such sitcom schlockola. Continue reading April 20, 2023 Movie Mike on Planet 93.9 with Dave and Darren — “Renfield,” “Nefarious,” “Sweetwater,” “The Pope’s Exorcist,” and “Mafia Mamma” →

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Mike Schulz talks with Dave Levora and Darren Pitra about how Schulz really likes the Michael Jordan/Chicago Bulls biopic Air — the acting, the writing — in spite of (or, perhaps, because of) Ben Affleck’s participation (“he’s got a lot of turkeys to live down,” Schulz writes); Paint, the bizarre not-Bob Ross trip starring Owen Wilson, whose character paints the same mountain on his PBS program and who has a devoted senior audience, is described tonally by Schulz as “Wes Anderson meets Christopher Guest meets Errol Morris meets Napoleon Dynamite,” and doesn’t quite come together satisfactorily, but was enjoyable nonetheless; and everyone marvels at the first-weekend gross of The Super Mario Bros Movie — $146 million domestically — which manages to shock Schulz at how “nakedly what it is”: An extended product-push with some fun voice cameos (Jack Black unleashes his Tenacious D) and a plot that “doesn’t make a lick of sense.” The three also anticipate Nicolas Cage’s turn in the forthcoming Renfield — Cage, having portrayed a deluded yuppie who thinks he’s a bloodsucker in 1988’s Vampire’s Kiss, has come full circle; Mafia Mama, with Toni Collette as an American mother who inherits her grandfather’s mobster enterprise in Italy (“cornball, but sounds like fun”); and Russell Crowe in The Pope’s Exorcist (“Crowe has gotten so fun now that he’s become full Brando, y’know, where he’s three hundred pounds and could give a damn now, [he’s] gonna emote [his] heart out”).

“Air,” “Paint,” and “The Super Mario Bros Movie”

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Mike Schulz talks with Dave Levora and Darren Pitra about how Schulz, contrary to Dave and Darren (D&D), thought Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves “fine, with really good jokes in it,” but, overall, a bland outing, hobbled somewhat by the screenwriters’ ambition to show that their characters have FEELINGS to go along with the action. Also, Schulz was never a D&D fan like D&D. Nevertheless, the jokes do land, so it’s got that going for it. . . About A Thousand & One, about characters living under the foster-care radar in lower-middle-class Nineties-era Harlem, Schulz declares it his favorite film of the year so far, “so moving and surprising and caring. . . a knockout.” A Good Person, directed by Zach Braff, is good, not great, but has strong acting, with Florence Pugh as an opioid addict making horrible choices left and right and Morgan Freeman as one of her victims. The film reminded Schulz that Freeman was once an actor — was there ever a time when he wasn’t? — and, at eighty-five years old, he’s once again Oscar-worthy. . .

“Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves,” “A Thousand & One,” and “A Good Person”