Category Archives: Reviews

‘California King’ A Sleeper


Ahmadpur California King starts with promise, then drifts into noise.

purchase peptides Clomiphene Travis Bennett plays Perry, a mattress salesman with a dumb idea. He fakes a kidnapping to impress a girl. That’s the whole movie.

Bennett, best known from Odd Future and Dave, isn’t bad. But he’s not enough. He plays it small, maybe too small. There’s no spark behind his eyes.

Jimmy Tatro plays his partner, Wyatt. Tatro’s a YouTube guy turned comic actor. He gives the movie its only real pulse. He knows how to land a line. He knows how to move.

The script is sharp at first. The lines crackle. The tone feels fresh. The music works. It hums under scenes, gives them rhythm. The first act moves fast and weird.

Then Joel McHale shows up.

He plays Zane, a crime boss. He’s supposed to be the villain. But he isn’t. He’s a void. He looks lost. The smirk from Community is still there, but it’s useless here. He’s not funny. He’s not scary. He’s not anything.

The movie falls apart around him. There’s no tension. No stakes. No story left to care about.

Victoria Justice plays the love interest. She’s fine. The script gives her nothing. She reacts. She disappears.

The plot spirals. It forgets what it was about. Scenes stretch too long. Jokes stop landing. The fake crime becomes a fake movie.

Even the look of the film loses steam. The color, the pace, the energy—all fade by the halfway point. What felt indie-cool turns lazy.

There are moments. A few lines hit. A few scenes breathe. But they’re buried. The movie doesn’t know what it wants to be. A crime comedy? A buddy film? A sketch?

It tries to be Community with kidnapping. But without the wit. Without the structure. It tries to be weird. It ends up dull.

California King sells chaos, but never closes the deal.

Why Hollywood Left L.A.


Hollywood left L.A. years ago. We just didn’t notice until the lights went out.

The signs were all there: empty lots at Paramount, crews flying to Georgia, and shows set in Los Angeles but shot in Toronto. What used to be a boomtown for cameras and cables is now a ghost light waiting for a curtain call.

It wasn’t one single blow—it was a death by a thousand tax credits.

Georgia’s peach logo became more familiar than the Hollywood sign. New Mexico, Louisiana, the U.K., Canada—everyone learned our lines, stole our grips, and offered 30–40% off. We countered with bureaucratic paperwork and a smile. California created a tax incentive too little, too late. We told ourselves: the magic lives here. But turns out, magic follows money.

In 2016, over 60% of network dramas were shot in L.A. Now? Barely 25%. And many of those pretend they’re here while filming an hour outside Budapest. It’s no longer a creative exodus—it’s logistics. If you want to shoot a film in L.A., you’d better write it in Albuquerque.

The ripple effect? It’s a wave. Grip trucks sold off. Catering companies closing. Prop houses downsizing. Once, it took six months and two favors to find a stage in the 30-mile zone. Now, they’re empty, echoing. Union hours are drying up. One estimate says 18,000 industry jobs gone in just the last few years. That’s not a statistic. That’s an obituary.

Everyone points to the pandemic and the strikes of 2023 as the pivot point. But this train left the station earlier. Those were just the last passengers boarding.

The myth that Hollywood means Los Angeles is a vanity we haven’t earned in a decade. We still roll out the red carpet, but we forgot the cameras aren’t even here anymore. Even Ben Affleck—who’s made movies about Boston in L.A.—had to admit, “It’s cheaper to film in Ireland. California took the industry for granted.”

Now, we beg. The governor talks about bigger incentives, more infrastructure, expanding credits. Good. But we’re in a street fight with cities that already won. It’s not just about money. It’s about trust. Reliability. And L.A. hasn’t been that for a while.

Want to know how far we’ve fallen? They filmed Oppenheimer—a movie about a California scientist—across New Mexico and New Jersey. That’s like shooting Rocky in Miami.

The crews are still here. The sun still shines. The talent still wants to come. But the industry doesn’t care where the sign is. It cares where the savings are.

Hollywood isn’t a place anymore. It’s a brand. And Los Angeles, once its flagship store, has become just another outlet mall.

There’s always time for restructuring, for change. But that window closes quickly.

By the time California finishes fixing the script, the tax credits may have already rolled.

’Alto’ Doubles De Niro, Halves Story


Double the De Niro, half the movie.

The Alto Knights stacks the deck with two Robert De Niros but forgets to deal the audience anything worth playing.

Barry Levinson directs this tired mob drama with all the zest of a rerun, stuffing De Niro into dual roles as real-life mobsters Vito Genovese and Frank Costello. The hook — two De Niros, facing off — should sizzle, but it barely simmers.

Instead, we watch the same old mob clichés: smoky backrooms, smirking consigliere, gunshots in the dark, blood on silk suits. The script by Nicholas Pileggi, adapting his own book Wise Guys, reads like it was dusted off from a 1990s drawer and never updated.

De Niro, an icon of the genre, appears tired here, as if even he knows this double billing is a gimmick. His Genovese stalks around with a stony glare, while his Costello delivers lines with a lazy drawl. There’s no true contrast between the two; both feel like faded echoes of better De Niro performances from Goodfellas and Casino.

The supporting cast fares little better. Debra Messing, Kathrine Narducci, and Cosmo Jarvis drift in and out of scenes without making a dent. Even the period detail, often Levinson’s strength, feels flat — a wax museum of fedoras and speakeasies.

Worst of all, the film drags. Clocking in at two hours, The Alto Knights sags under ponderous voiceover and redundant scenes of mob meetings that fail to escalate tension. Levinson, once a sharp chronicler of American life in Diner and Rain Man, seems lost in this joyless exercise.

Pileggi’s script offers scant insight into the psychology of these men or the shifting dynamics of postwar organized crime. What we get instead is a sepia-toned greatest-hits reel: a hit in the street, a courtroom scene, a wiretap, a betrayal. You can almost hear Scorsese’s editor Thelma Schoonmaker shaking her head at the pacing.

One might argue that The Irishman already served as a swan song for this genre and for De Niro’s mob roles. The Alto Knights feels like an encore no one asked for.

Worse, it misunderstands what made those classics tick: not just violence, but humanity, betrayal, consequence. Here, characters move like chess pieces, with none of the messy life that powered Goodfellas or Donnie Brasco.

The double De Niro conceit is pure marketing, and it shows. Scene after scene leans on split screens and editing tricks, hoping viewers will marvel at the digital wizardry rather than notice the lifeless dialogue.

Audiences deserve more from Levinson, Pileggi, and especially De Niro. They once elevated this genre; here, they cheapen it.

The movie ends, the lights rise, and you wonder — with two De Niros, how did they make a film with no pulse?

One De Niro would have been plenty, if only they’d given him a story worth telling.