Happy Saturday From My Own Couch, For Once

Good morning, friends, so great to see you. And it’s so great to be home after running around the past couple of weeks. I love traveling but it definitely takes a week to get ready for it and a week to recover. This is especially true for us this time, because as soon as we got back from Montreal and Boston, we had to get Nic ready to leave for Mammoth for a week of cross country training in the altitude before high school starts. This is a trip he’s been looking forward to since February, and the photos from there look spectacular. We’re so happy for him.

But! Work continues here at sea level for the grown-ups. It’s August, which is always a mixed bag for movies. And we had a lot of catching up to do from my absence. Here’s what we reviewed at our Breakfast All Day YouTube channel:

• TRAP. The latest from M. Night Shyamalan has an inspired premise and lots of impressive camerawork, and it held us in its grip for a while. But eventually it fell apart, like so many Shyamalan films tend to do. This one takes place at an arena where Josh Hartnett’s character has taken his daughter to see her favorite pop star perform. (She happens to be played by the director’s daughter, Saleka Shyamalan.) We loved Hartnett’s multilayered performance, though. In theaters.

• CUCKOO. We also had an early review of this buzzy thriller, but we’re still not entirely sure it makes sense. Hunter Schafer stars as a 17-year-old who’s forced to travel with her father and his new family to a resort in the Bavarian Alps. Bizarre things start happening almost immediately. Dan Stevens gives a delightfully showy performance as the resort’s menacing owner. (I also reviewed “Cuckoo” for RogerEbert.com this week, if you’d like to read that.) In theaters.

• IT ENDS WITH US. My dear friend Katie Walsh, the brilliant Tribune News Service critic, joins me for a review of this romantic drama, based on the Colleen Hoover bestseller. Blake Lively stars as a woman who falls into a passionate but abusive relationship with a hunky neurosurgeon, played by the film’s director, Justin Baldoni. We’re both super mixed on this one, but there seems to be great interest in it: I went to a 5pm Thursday showing in my neighborhood with a mom friend, and it was packed. In theaters.

• THE INSTIGATORS. This movie is getting terrible reviews, but we had a good time, and Alonso flat-out loved it. Matt Damon and Casey Affleck star in this mismatched buddy heist comedy from director Doug Liman. It is SO Boston, from the accents to the geography. In theaters and streaming on Apple TV+

• MOVIE NEWS LIVE! Nice to be back with our folks for our weekly livestream. Among the topics we discussed were who should play Tim Walz on “Saturday Night Live,” Timothée Chalamet as Bob Dylan, and Alonso’s upcoming trip to the Venice Film Festival. Join us here every Friday at Noon Pacific time.

• DEADPOOL & WOLVERINE SPOILER CHAT. So much happens in “Deadpool & Wolverine” that we knew we had to do a separate spoiler chat to discuss all the cameos and inside jokes, as well as where this franchise now sits within the larger Marvel Cinematic Universe. Would love to hear your thoughts now that we can get into it a little more.

Over at our Breakfast All Day Patreon, we started recapping “Time Bandits,” Taika Waititi’s take on the 1981 Terry Gilliam movie. (We revisited it here recently as part of our Was It Great or Were You 8? series.) This Apple TV+ show takes the basic structure of the film — bumbling crooks bop through history with the help of a boy and a stolen map — and makes some tweaks to the characters and the tone. We’re only a couple of episodes in, but we’re enjoying it so far. Watch along with us and let us know what you think.

Here’s a cool thing I’m doing tonight: FilmWeek is showing the original “The Fast and the Furious” from 2001 and doing a Q&A afterward, and I get to be a part of it alongside legendary LAist host Larry Mantle and my darling Amy Nicholson. We’ll be talking to Mic Rodgers, the stunt coordinator and 2nd unit director, and Craig Lieberman, the film’s racing consultant. The screening will be at The Frida Cinema in Santa Ana, one of our great Southern California arthouses, which always offers inspired, curated programming. It’ll be a blast to watch this again with a packed audience of #family. Join us if you’re in town.

And here’s a cool thing I did this week: I had the pleasure of meeting up with Andrew Krueger, longtime friend of the channel and our Patreon, for coffee while he was visiting family in the South Bay from Chicago. Andrew is a high school Spanish teacher and a huge film lover, and he’s one of the first people to do a Table for One review with us. We met up at the beach on a beautiful, sunny morning, and it was a lovely way to start the day. One of the great joys of building our community is feeling like we’ve made friends with people we never would have known otherwise. I’m so glad you’re a part of things, too.

Thanks so much as always for being here. Things should settle down a bit now that summer’s ending and fall is beginning, and I can’t wait to share all the big movies with you that are coming out of festival season. If you’ve found value in this newsletter, I’d be honored if you’d pass it along to a friend. Have a great week, and I’ll see you back here next Saturday.