Vanilla's My Favorite

We watch several movies a week. Every Friday, we'll talk a little about some of the movies we watched that we felt were Worth Mentioning.

Action, sci-fi, fashion, and Superman.

THE ICE ROAD (2021)

I’ve fallen far behind on the action movie side of Liam Neeson’s career, but the 2021 Netflix release The Ice Road came highly recommended by my in-laws, so I decided to check it out... and it didn’t hurt that it was a movie that involves truck drivers. I have a soft spot for that kind of movie, since my father and paternal grandfather were both truck drivers. I have spent a lot of my life around big rigs.

As it turns out, my girlfriend and I weren’t as enamored with the film as her parents were, but it wasn’t a bad way to spend 109 minutes. 

Neeson stars in this one as truck driver Mike McCann, an Irish man who lives in the United States and is struggling to make ends meet and care for his brother Gurty (Marcus Thomas), an Iraq War veteran suffering from PTSD and aphasia. When an explosion at a mine in Manitoba traps over two dozen miners underground, they can’t be rescued until a methane pocket is drilled and capped. A 30-ton, 18-foot wellhead and 300 feet of pipe will need to be trucked to the location – and the only way to get there is across “ice roads,” man-made roads over frozen water. Strapped for cash, Mike and Gurty volunteer for the job.

The brothers hit the road with fellow truckers Jim Goldenrod (Laurence Fishburne) and Tantoo (Amber Midthunder), as well as actuary Varnay, who’s responsible for insurance risk assessment for the mining company, Katka.  $200,000 will be split between the four truckers, and the money will be redistributed among the survivors if anyone dies on the way to the mine. Coincidentally, $200,000 is exactly what the McCann brothers would need to buy their own semi truck.

Things start going wrong almost immediately. Engines seize, ice breaks, there’s a pressure wave, winching failures, a drowning or two. There are accusations of sabotage, and the prime suspects are Varnay or Tantoo. But why would Tantoo be a saboteur when her brother, Cody, is one of the miners trapped underground? 

So, as if the “driving across ice” situation wasn’t dangerous enough to begin with, it’s also revealed that there are human enemies to deal with – not just the saboteur in the group, but also an evil executive and contractors who serve as henchmen that the heroes have to fight and smash their way through. Because any action thriller like these needs henchmen and ass-kicking. I thought the tension of traversing ice roads would be enough, but writer/director Jonathan Hensleigh obviously disagreed.

I don’t know what my father would have thought of the trucking aspect of the film; I don’t know if that’s accurate enough. (I never really paid attention to that sort of thing.) But I suspect he would have enjoyed the movie overall, because action was his favorite genre.

THE BOROUGHS SEASON ONE (2026)

Created by Jeffrey Addiss and Will Matthews and executive produced by Stranger Things creators the Duffer Brothers, the Netflix sci-fi series The Boroughs gets started by introducing a character played by genre Dee Wallace, who is revealed to be living her best life: she has a nice house in a picturesque desert retirement community called the Boroughs, where she eats her dinner in front of a TV showing a game show (Jeopardy! in this case) and then goes to bed with The Golden Girls playing on TV. Game shows and old sitcoms? This is the ideal way to live out someone’s golden years, as far as I’m concerned – and I’m even getting a jump-start on that ideal in my 40s by fitting as much game shows and old sitcoms into my days as I can.

Unfortunately, Dee Wallace’s peace is disrupted when a monstrous creature appears in her home and drags her into the darkness.

Jump ahead some time and a recently widowed man named Sam Cooper (Alfred Molina) is moving into the home that formerly belonged to Wallace’s character. In mourning and plagued by dreams and visions of his late wife, Sam is grumpy and off-putting – but that doesn’t stop his neighbor Jack (Bill Pullman) from inviting him to a barbecue, where he meets fellow Boroughs residents Judy (Alfre Woodard), who is having an affair with Jack; Judy’s pothead husband Art (Clarke Peters); the terminally ill former doctor Wally (Denis O’Hare); and retired music manager Renee (Geena Davis), who soon strikes up a relationship with much-younger security guard Paz (Carlos Miranda).

It doesn’t take long for this group of characters to realize that something deeply strange is going on in the Boroughs – in fact, that first episode ends with Sam witnessing the death of Jack, who was being fed on by the same type of monster that Dee Wallace was attacked by in the middle of the night. That was a bummer, because Jack was the best character in the first episode, will Bill Pullman really swooping in and stealing the show for a while... but the fact that we feel the loss has us rooting for the survivors even more as they investigate his death and try to figure out what’s going on.

That search will lead them to the community’s long-term care facility, where Edward (Ed Begley Jr.), the husband of Dee Wallace’s character, is one of the residents, and the answer may have something to do with the CEO of the community, Blaine Shaw (Seth Numrich), whose family has been running the place for 75 years. There’s also some weirdness involving Blaine’s wife Anneliese (Alice Kremelberg) and unhelpful security guard Hank (Eric Edelstein).

The Boroughs has been described as “Stranger Things with old people,” and that’s not too far off base. There is definitely a Stranger Things “fun, weird adventure” vibe to the show, and while it’s firmly set in modern day, there is a vintage throwback edge to life in the Boroughs, and there are elements that are reminiscent of the sort of ‘80s classics that Stranger Things existed to pay homage to. It has that Steven Spielberg / Amblin feel to it at times, the opening title sequence looks like it could have come out of the ‘80s, and there was something along the way that had me thinking of the 1985 classic Cocoon – which wasn’t a Spielberg production, but was sort of in the same ball park. (It was directed by Ron Howard, who replaced Robert Zemeckis, and was produced by the men who were behind Spielberg’s The Sugarland Express and Jaws.)

The story takes some interesting twists and turns, and I enjoyed spending time with the characters. A lot of mysterious things are thrown are way as the season’s eight episodes play out and they don’t all make sense by the time the end credits come up... but it might be for the best that they weren’t all explained in detail. If The Boroughs doesn’t get another season, this batch of episodes did have an ending that I found to be 99% satisfying. But if there are more seasons (Addiss and Matthews have a three-season plan), it would be interesting to see what happens next.

THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA (2006)

Directed by David Frankel from a script by Aline Brosh McKenna that was based on a novel by Lauren Weisberger, the comedy-drama The Devil Wears Prada was a hit when it was released back in 2006, earning over $320 million at the box office (on a budget that was somewhere in the range of 35 to 41 million). It also got good reviews and earned Meryl Streep a Golden Globe win for her performance as fashion magazine editor-in-chief Miranda Priestly. Streep was also nominated for an Oscar, a BAFTA, a SAG award, and a Critics’ Choice award. This movie was a big deal back in the day... and I never watched it. If I ever did cross paths with it, it was just playing in the background and I didn’t pay much attention to it.

The film certainly found its audience, but I wasn’t part of that audience. It just didn’t sound appealing to me. It stars Anne Hathaway as Andrea “Andy” Sachs, an aspiring journalist who doesn’t have any interest in fashion until she lands a job at Runway magazine, working as a junior personal assistant to Priestly. Andy doesn’t fit in at the Runway offices and has to deal with irrational demands from Priestly. She develops a sort of “frenemy” relationship with senior assistant Emily Charlton (Emily Blunt) and gets a fashion hook-up from fashion director Nigel Kipling (Stanley Tucci) so she can fit in better.

Andy’s personal life falls apart, she loses her boyfriend Nate (Adrian Grenier) – although that’s not much of a loss – and there are shake-ups both behind-the-scenes at Runway and in Priestly’s own personal life. There’s also another journalist lurking around, Simon Baker as Christian Thompson, who may or may not be a positive presence in Andy’s life...

Catching up with The Devil Wears Prada twenty years after it was released, I have to say that I’m glad I never truly attempted to watch this movie before. If I had, I probably would have been watching it by myself, and it would have done absolutely nothing for me. I wouldn’t have cared about a single thing that happens in this story. Watching it now, I still didn’t really care what was happening and I was often distracted by a recurring theme in the score composed by Theodore Shapiro because it was very reminiscent of the 1994 song “I Swear” by the R&B group All-4-One.

But I had a good time watching the movie because I wasn’t watching it alone. I was watching it with my longtime girlfriend, who had somehow never showed the movie to me before during our years together. She was in the target audience for The Devil Wears Prada and it worked for her completely. During this viewing, she was invested in the story and laughed at all the jokes – so, even though I didn’t care what was happening, I enjoyed the movie because she enjoyed it.

And there’s no denying that Meryl Streep does excellent work in the role of Miranda Priestly, all while speaking most of her lines at a volume that’s barely above a whisper.

SMALLVILLE SEASON THREE (2003-2004)

I really liked the first season of the “teen Clark Kent / future Superman” TV series Smallville and found the show’s second season to be even better – but it can be tricky to sustain or boost quality season after season, and for me, Smallville stumbled a bit with its third season. Over the course of these twenty-two episodes, we come across some story elements that made this season less interesting and tougher to watch than its predecessors.

Here’s the set-up for the show: In October of 1989, the Kansas town of Smallville was struck by a devastating meteor shower that made a mess of the place – and from the wreckage emerged a small boy, who was taken in by farmers Jonathan and Martha Kent (John Schneider and Annette O’Toole). The Kents named their adopted son Clark... and over the years, they realized that he is gifted with incredible strength and speed, gifts that Jonathan has encouraged him to hide from the world as much as possible for his own safety. As he makes his way through his teen years, Clark’s abilities are being more powerful and varied.

As season 3 begins, Clark (played by Tom Welling) is still dealing with the shocking revelation that he was sent to Earth on purpose by his parents on the disintegrating world of Krypton – and his parents believed he could and should conquer mankind. That’s not who Clark is, though. He’s a good kid, raised well by his Earth parents... but that doesn’t mean the truth of his arrival on the planet didn’t shake him to his core. During his time here, he has discovered that the green meteor rocks from his planet weaken him, but red meteor rocks – red Kryptonite – releases his inhibitions. So in the aftermath of finding out that his Kryptonian parents sucked, he has spent some time running on red Kryptonite and being mischievous in Metropolis, the big city that’s not far from Smallville.

But the show isn’t called Metropolis, so Clark is soon brought back to his senses and returns to Smallville. That’s a fine way to get things started, and there are plenty of interesting episodes to come, as Clark crosses paths with the likes of a crime boss who’s played by different people in different episodes (thanks to plastic surgery), a vigilante who kills the people who have gained powers from the Kryptonian meteor rocks, a girl who can pull Clark into her dreams, someone with magnetic mind-control powers, another person with email mind-control powers, someone who foresees deaths, a friend who gains the power to compel honesty, and a mysterious girl who claims to be Clark’s cousin from Krypton. These stories allow for some fun guest stars, like Adrienne Palicki as “Kryptonian Kara,” Katharine Isabelle as the girl who special dream abilities, Kevin Zegers as a guy who dates Clark’s crush Lana Lang (Kristin Kreuk), Rutger Hauer as a crime boss, Ian Somerhalder as a weirdo, and more – including Michael McKean as an alcoholic journalist named Perry White, who Superman fans will know will someday be Clark’s boss at the Daily Planet newspaper.

There are also some really dodgy episodes, though. Like one where Clark’s friend Pete (Sam Jones III) gets mixed up with some street racers who use Kryptonite in their vehicles instead of nitrous oxide. Pete discovered the secret of Clark’s abilities in the previous season, and the writers were clearly struggling with how to carry on their story, getting to the point where Pete just flat-out leaves the show by the end of the season.

I found that the roughest moments in the season concerned Clark’s billionaire best friend Lex Luthor (Michael Rosenbaum), who’s a good guy and tries to do the right things, but the world is always messing with him and trying to push him over to the dark side. His evil bastard of a father, John Glover as Lionel Luthor, is the main cloud hanging over Lex’s head, but he has plenty of other bad things going on – and when the season starts, his new bride (Emmanuelle Vaugier) has just attempted to kill him with a plane crash, a stunt that results in him being stranded on a deserted island for a while.

That’s very soap opera, but it’s easier to handle than the story arc ahead of the character, as it’s introduced that Lex has some serious mental issues, gets institutionalized for a while, learns of Clark’s secret abilities, then loses his memory so he forgets Clark’s secret. That stuff didn’t work for me at all... but at least it was better than the idea that Lionel has been using samples of Clark’s blood to resurrect the dead, then sends his zombies out as spies.

Clark and Lana’s “will they get together or not” back-and-forth was also stretched beyond the point of absurdity and into full-on “this is annoying” territory in this season. If you’re too frustrated by the fact that Clark and Lana won’t give into their feelings for each other, the season does drop in a highly questionable episode that flashes back to 1961 to show us that Clark’s Kryptonian father Jor-El (who is usually voiced by Terence Stamp, but in this episode is played by Welling) visited Kansas decades ago and fell in love with a local woman – who happens to have been a relative of Lana’s, so Kreuk plays dual roles in this episode as well. I wasn’t a fan of any of that, either.

I still got some enjoyment out of Smallville season 3, but I went through it with less enthusiasm than I did the previous seasons, and that lessened enthusiasm is carrying over into season 4.