The Week That Was - July 21, 2025

Filling in some gaps in Michael Mann's filmography, farewell Duster, we hardly knew ye, and some cinematic missteps.

I had a pretty low-key week mostly spent trying to take care of some stuff like getting my Upwork profile updated and ready to rock, and working on Unkind Rewind edits, knocking out a really fun one with improv performer and actress, Canedy Knowles ahead of the movie we’ll be watching for Thursday’s Main Event. A bunch of the stuff I watched below was watched while I was unable to sleep, so take that for what it’s worth.

TV

Duster (Season 1) - Relatively light fare, this LaToya Morgan helmed show co-created by J.J. Abrams is a fun throwback with plenty of action and car chases starring Josh Holloway and Rachel Hilson with Keith David, Corbin Bernsen, Greg Grunberg, Donal Logue, and Gail O’Grady rounding out a supporting cast that’s easy to watch. As far as action shows are concerned, there have certainly been ones that have done it better in the last decade or so, but this was a good time, even if it wasn’t super memorable. This is the only season for the show, as HBO didn’t renew it, so watch it while you can if you’re at all interested because Zaslav & Co. have a recent history of disappearing shows like this. HBO Max

Hacks (Season 4) - Like every season thus far, this one starts with Deborah and Ava at odds with one another, a dynamic that (now tediously) persists through the first half of the season. Other than adding Michaela Watkins to the mix as their ineffectual, network-mandated buffer, this is the most tiresome their bipolar relationship has played out when it’s been in the acrimony stage of a season before they kiss and make up. The latter half of the season is much better than the first half, and mostly salvages a season that was getting very close to us dumping it from our watchlist in the first half. Given where the season ends, I could see the fifth season having a course correction, but this was the first season where we were both bordering on exasperated while watching Hacks spin its wheels. HBO Max

Her Last Broadcast: The Abduction of Jodi Huisentruit - We’ve got yet another TV news dive into the 1995 disappearance of KIMT news anchor Jodi Huisentruit in Mason City, IA. This is a three-episode docuseries from ABC News, produced and directed by the husband-and-wife documentarian duo of Andy and Maria Awes of Minneapolis-based production company Committee Films, who also produced a 20/20 episode on the case back in 2022 that led to some new leads, though nothing that has led to an arrest or closure of the case. This is a case that I’ll watch just about any update on, as it was a case of intense regional interest when I was in high school. I talked about it on Munch My Benson early on, when it seemed to be a case that was informing the episode “Remorse” that we drew early on in our run and then redrew for episode 164. This was solid for an ABC News for Hulu thing. Hulu, Disney+

Film

China Moon (1994) - Part of the Miami Neo-Noir collection on the Criterion Channel, this was the only entry I’d not seen in the collection other than Miami Vice. Of every other movie I’ve seen in the collection, this was the least memorable. Starring Ed Harris, Madeleine Stowe, Benicio Del Toro, and Charles Dance, this just lacked the urgency or intensity that some of its contemporary sweaty neo-noir flicks. Part of this probably owes to Stowe’s character being a reluctant femme fatale. Some can probably be attributed to Stowe and Harris’s lack of chemistry together. Sadly, this one was forgotten for a reason, and that it seems to be cinematographer-by-trade John Bailey’s only scripted feature to get released isn’t surprising when seeing this languid flick. Criterion, Tubi

End of the Road (1970) - Adapted from the John Barth novel The End of the Road, who disavowed the film for being vulgar, this was an unfocused, meandering mess of a counterculture film that adds fuel to the fire that’s burned for the past six decades suggesting Boomers haven’t known what they stood for. Garnering an X-rating that seems quaint in 2025, this Aram Avakian film (on which Terry Southern is a credited screenwriter) shifts wildly in tone from minute to minute, with things like forward momentum, grounded performances, and scene-to-scene cohesion being entirely eschewed for the sake of a film that seems to alternate between psychedelia and pastoral with little rhyme or reason. Stacy Keach seems to be doing an impression of Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate, and James Earl Jones goes BIG, but I don’t think either performance even remotely works. This is a turgid mess that you can likely avoid, unless you, like Steven Soderbergh—who directed a doc for its DVD release—are Terry Southern devotee. Criterion

Miami Vice (2006) - This was one of the few Michael Mann movies I hadn’t seen before. I can’t say I wish I’d seen it sooner. Or at all really. Frankly, there were dozens upon dozens of lines that played so dumb that my eyes almost got stuck in the rolled back position. This just played like Mann was doing cartoonish self-parody (he directed the pilot of the TV series). I guess some of the action was fine, and it still looked like a Michael Mann movie, but this was impossibly stupid. Criterion

The Amateur (2025) - Diligent readers know that I watched the original version of this film a few months ago. It was fine, I guess. Kinda boring. There was definitely room for an update that improved on the original film. I don’t think that happened here. This was very boring. Boring enough that I fell asleep and had to go back and watch a chunk that I’d missed. This was so bad that we threw on the next movie listed to cleanse our palettes. Hulu

The Bourne Identity (2002) - While this is the origin story, the place where Jason Bourne’s story is most interesting, and the film that features his best romantic pairing in the form of Franka Potente, this is definitely a lesser version of what Paul Greengrass would get to do in the second and third installments. This still works, but largely because of the premise. This just isn’t as precisely executed as Supremacy or Ultimatum, with exhibit A in support of that being how unintentionally comical the foley work was in the fight scenes, and exhibit B being how hilarious it was when the first assassin who tries to take out Jason exiting stage left by throwing himself off the balcony window he’d just repelled through minutes earlier. Blu-ray

Strange Days (1995) - I hadn’t seen this in at least 20 years and remembered very little of the film past Ralph Fiennes, Angela Bassett, and VR nonsense. I love Kathryn Bigelow, but this is a bloated mess undone by its script co-written and conceived by James Cameron, which has so many loose ends it’s shocking because this was nearly two-and-a-half hours in which there was plenty of time to lock down things like how Macey could have gone from a waitress in a diner to a limo driver with a background in high-end security in what can’t have been more than a few years. The vision of a future five years off is also pretty hilarious. Hollywood’s early ‘90s belief that VR was going to be revolutionary never stops being funny. Things got very dark between 1994 or so, whenever this script was being locked in and Y2K. There are so many deficiencies in the storytelling here—no one thought Sizemore was wearing a wig?—but the biggest hole in the film is Angela Bassett’s Macey having an unrequited love for Fiennes’s Nero, who is such a sad-sack POS that it’s completely implausible that she’d have those feelings for him. If you want to feel what 1995 felt like, I guess you could do worse, but this film is waaaaay too long, and the tech at the heart of it feels very dumb. Criterion

The Keep (1983) - Another Michael Mann film I’d not seen. This was fundamentally more interesting to me than Miami Vice, but it was definitely still lesser Mann. Running just 96 minutes, it felt much longer. The premise is sort of interesting, I guess, and the vibe created via a highly stylized mise-en-scene is seriously noteworthy. It’s just slow, and there’s not enough going on here to have it play as much more than a middling entry in Mann’s catalog. Criterion

Untamed Heart (1993) - I don’t think I saw this until I’d left Minneapolis the first time, but there’s something kinda charming about this romantic drama. Should we be creeped out by Christian Slater’s Adam essentially being a stalker? Yes. Are we though? Oddly no. Slater’s all right here, but it’s Marisa Tomei who makes this film work, and their love story is more touching to me than it probably should be. I just kinda like this movie for reasons I’m not sure make a ton of sense but feel very much rooted in the 1993 of this film. Prime, Tubi