By Debbie Schlussel
You’ve already seen my review of the new “Star Trek” movie. Here are my reviews of the rest of the new releases, this weekend. These two movies have a couple of things in common: 1) I hated them, and 2) both feature limb-cutting disgusting scenes designed just for the purpose of shocking us. I say, stick with “Star Trek,” or rent something.
* “Next Day Air“: This movie, starring a mostly Black (and the few that are not Black are Hispanic) cast, is something of a voluntary minstrel show. Black actors voluntarily join the casts of this type of garbage, and Black audiences go to see movies like this in droves, after Black radio stations promote it and give out free tickets. And it’s complete and utter crap. If I were Black, I’d wonder why Hollywood consistently serves my people up with so much trash like this. I’d wonder why they think I should see this kind of big screen glorification of pointless violence, obscenity, and drug trade.

Donald Faison plays a delivery man for a private national express mail service, much like FedEx or UPS. A complete stoner, he is high when he accidentally delivers a large ceramic piece containing a huge cocaine shipment to the wrong address. The slacker stoners who live in the apartment quickly plan on how they will sell the stuff and make millions for themselves. They deal with one of their drug-dealing cousins, but don’t completely trust him. Meanwhile, the man who as supposed to receive the shipment, across the hall, and his girlfriend are sweating over the drugs. Their kingpin travels from Mexico to get them to talk and find the drugs.
The movie is mostly four-letter words–pretty much every other word–and an exercise in observing unworthy lowlifes in, um, “conversation.” That, and a disgusting scene in which a man’s tongue is cut out by one of the slacker lowlifes planning to deal the drugs. Yes, American society has long past disintegrated, and this piece of on-screen celluloid crap is Exhibit “A.” Extremely violent, disgusting, boring, and pointless. Stop glamorizing the dregs of the ‘hood, Hollywood.
If the studio allowed me to still review this movie, not having seen the whole execrable thing, I’d have walked out. Believe me, I wanted to very badly, the entire time.
FOUR MARXES PLUS

* “Is Anybody There?“: Michael Caine plays an aging man who lives in a senior citizens nursing home in the house of a middle-aged, bitter working-class English couple in the midst of marital strife. Struck with mild dementia, he befriends the couple’s young son. But while his declining mental state is not apparent, it soon becomes so, with dire and disgusting consequences. He performs a finger-cutting magic trick that he screws up, accidentally cutting off another ailing senior citizen’s finger in front of the kids at the young son’s birthday party. That was disgusting and unnecessary.
As was, in my opinion, the rest of this boring movie. A complete, depressing waste of time. I like Michael Caine, but I wish I’d skipped this. You were forewarned. Most critics raved over this, but the movie emperor wears no film. There’s nothing here to see here.
THREE MARXES