The Sandlot is one of the most beloved baseball movies of all time. People have a deep emotional connection to that movie. Although I do not love it as much as some people, it was always an entertaining watch. However, The Sandlot 2, a direct-to-video from 2005, cannot be considered in the same category. This was really a letdown.

Same basic story, but they have added in some girls.

And rockets.

Instead of having a baseball hit into the yard with “The Beast”, in Sandlot 2 the kids have to try and retrieve a rocket that Smalls (James Willson) accidentally launched into the impregnable yard guarded by “The Great Fear,” the mythological dog next door.

It is amazing how much this sequel is like the original, story wise. There was nearly nothing new or original in the tale. In fact, with just a couple of substitutions, there was zero differences. This group of kids seemed to fit in with the direct-to-video concept of the film. They’re acting skills were not necessarily their strong points.

There was a cute relationship with David (Max Lloyd-Jones) and Hayley (Samantha Burton), but it was nothing new either.

My favorite part was seeing one of my childhood heroes, Steve Garvey, make an appearance as a little league coach. Steve Garvey was a former first baseman for the Los Angeles Dodgers and he was my favorite baseball player those first few years of my fandom. He’s not much of an actor, but I love him anyway.

James Earl Jones was here again playing the exact character…nearly with the same dialogue, that he did in the Sandlot. I hope he got a nice, fat paycheck for this.

The Sandlot 2 is a terrible movie that had absolutely no reason to have been made.

In honor of the arrival of Loki on Disney + today, I wanted the DailyView to feature the one and only Tom Hiddleston so I went to IMDB to look for a movie that I had not seen from the God of Mischief himself. Obviously, it was not going to be anything from the MCU, which I have seen countless times, but there were several others that I had already seen: Crimson Peak, Kong: Skull Island, High-Rise, I Saw the Light…all of which I had seen. Then, I found an interesting one that I had never heard of before. Only Lovers Left Alive was released in 2013 and featured Hiddleston with Tilda Swinton and they were, apparently, playing vampires. I was sufficiently intrigued.

Tom Hiddleston was Adam, a depressed vampire who is a mysterious, but legendary musician. He records his music is secret and passes it to the world via a human (he called ‘zombie’) named Ian (Anton Yelchin). Feeling suicidal, Adam had Ian make him a wooden bullet.

His centuries old wife, Eve (Tilda Swinton) heard his desperation on the phone and she came to be with Adam and things were looking up. However, with the arrival of Eve’s wild sister Ava (Mia Wasikowska), the couple is thrown into chaos.

There should not be much doubt to this, but Tom Hiddleston and Tilda Swinton are absolutely fantastic here. They are so charismatic that even with Hiddleston acting depressed and suicidal he is a joy to watch. The film succeeds on their back.

In fact, the story itself includes bits of events that happen to these two vampires in the current world. Even the stuff with the sister felt like a side note in the long run.

Eve has a close relationship with Christopher Marlowe (John Hurt). Yes, that Christopher Marlowe, who, according to the film, faked his own death in 1593 and survived under the protection of a protégé. Hurt is a nice addition to the cast and does some quality work here.

The film is very much about music and the passions of the heart and the search to find where you fall in the current world.

Only Lovers Left Alive is moody and melancholic, funny and sad at the same time and an intelligent character study of a pair who just happen to be vampires. It truly is unlike any vampire movie you have seen before. I do not know why I had never heard of this before, but I am happy that I got to watch it this morning.

The third movie of the day for the DailyView was one that had a rotten score on Rotten Tomatoes, but that I thought was considerably better than that. On the site, Cold Skin, the film directed by Xavier Gens, has currently a score of 48% which would make it “rotten.” It also had a 56% audience score, so plenty of people found this a bad movie.

I would disagree with all of them. I actually enjoyed this one quite a bit.

In 1914, a young man (David Oakes) arrives on a nearly deserted island near the Antarctic Circle. He is there to replace another man who had been placed on the island a year before as a weather observer. However, there was no sign of the man. The only person here was Gruner (Ray Stevenson), who manages the lighthouse. He claimed that the other man was dead, had walked away one night and never returned.

As the new young man settled into his new routine, he realized that there was more to this island than what he knew. When monsters attacked his cabin, the young man (who would be eventually called ‘friend’) desperately fought them off and had to retreat to the lighthouse, where Gruner is anything but welcoming.

The film was very dark, beautifully shot and filled with excellent practical effects. These monsters are great designs. The images of the island are wonderfully fitting with the isolation felt by the lighthouse.

Aura Garrido plays one of the monsters and she brings a lot of humanity to the role that could have been played with very little.

There is a conflict between Gruner and Friend that really does not go anywhere. It feels like a story beat just tossed out there to add to the anxiety, but it just goes nowhere and should have been removed.

I am also not sure about the very end of the movie. What happens at the last scene does not make sense to me and serves to downplay the story the movie was telling.

I found this movie exciting and tense. I was not sure what was going to happen and I was enjoying what was there. There were a few things that I would have liked to happen and the film did drop a few plot points, but it was overall a solid watch.

The next movie in the DailyView binge watch comes from an adaptation of one of Stephen King’s novels. There have been plenty of King adaptations hitting the big screen. Some were awesome such as It, Carrie, Stand by Me or The Shining (Sorry Stephen, I love that movie). Some were not as good such as Children of the Corn, It Chapter 2 or The Dark Tower. The adaptation that I am going to talk about today is Christine.

Directed by John Carpenter, Christine is an evil red Plymouth Fury that had a history of people dying in mysterious manners around it. Named Christine, it bonded with nerdy teenager Arnie (Keith Gordon) and Arnie immediately became obsessed with the car. As soon as he discovered Christine, Arnie changed becoming more aggressive, more angry and completely focused on the car.

Arnie became more verbally abusive toward his parents, started spending less time with his best friend Dennis (John Stockwell), and hooked up with new girl Leigh (Alexandra Paul). Unfortunately, Leigh began to feel uncomfortable in the car and nearly chokes to death.

After the bully (William Ostrander) attempts to destroy Christine, Arnie discovers the car’s special abilities

Sure, some of Christine is silly, but it is a solid adaptation and is filled with decent scenes. Though we see a flashback to its time on the assembly line back in Detroit in 1957, we do not get any sort of origin for how the car became such a killer. There were two accidents during that flashback, but there is no attempt to explain what was going on. I liked that.

We are also never quite sure to what level Arnie is involved in Christine’s reign of terror as she killed those that had wrecked her. I liked that as well, although we do learn his involvement or understanding at the end of the movie.

Yes, there is a lot of credibility that needs to be stretched to make this work, but the fact that the film plays it straight allows us to overlook some of the unlikely events going on.

Harry Dean Stanton appears here as Detective Junkins, but his role was vastly underutilized. He had maybe two or three scenes that certainly show off his great skill, but leave you wanting for more.

Christine is a fun movie that takes a silly premise and creates an effective and entertaining movie. The flaming Christine scene was easily my favorite and one of the best effects of the production.

This movie is set in 2022, which is right around the corner, so everybody needs to make sure to keep checking those food labels!

We head into a sci-fi dystopian future for DailyView today. A world where it has been overpopulated and polluted. The people are desperate for food provided by the Soylent company.

Charlton Heston starred in Soylent Green as Detective Thorn, who has been assigned to the case of the murder of William Simonson (Joseph Cotton), a Soylent board member. At first, it is assumed that the murder was part of a robbery, but Thorn quickly discovers that it is an assassination and he goes about trying to figure out the truth of the case. What he finds out, though, is shocking.

I, of course, knew the secret of Soylent Green before starting the movie. I wonder what it would have been like if I had not been aware of the shocking plot twist.

The movie was an enjoyable watch, especially with the work of the case. I was not much of a fan of Heston and his toxic masculine, especially with the women of the time. That might be a factor of the time period, but calling the women “furniture” was a bit too much.

Soylent Green is very dark and what makes it the scariest is that I could see this future being one that is easily reached.

I had an epic problem trying to watch this movie last week when I wound up watching the fourth film in this series called Crazy Hong Kong instead. After realizing that I was watching the wrong movie, I finished that one and started looking for the actual movie, The Gods Must Be Crazy. It was nowhere on any of the streaming services (that I could find) so I went to Ebay and I purchased the DVD copy. It arrived today so I decided to give this a second attempt at adding The Gods Must Be Crazy to the DailyView.

A Bushman named Xi (N!xau) found a Coca-Cola bottle that had fallen from an airplane. He had no idea what it was, but it became one of the most valuable tools his village had ever seen. However, they started to fight over the bottle and it caused problems internally. Xi decided that the bottle was evil and went to throw it off the edge of the earth.

This is a premise that is filled with comedic potential, but there are like a couple other storylines going on at the same time that have little, if anything to do with the main plot point. There is a clumsy scientist (Marius Weyers) and a school teacher (Sandra Prinsloo). There are military conflicts with local armies and a warlord all over the place with rocket launchers and tanks. It makes the narrative very choppy and difficult to follow.

All of the stories do combine at the end, but the whole Coke bottle bit was an after thought at this point. It was just a trick to get Xi involved with these other characters.

There was a ton of slapstick comedy here that was funny. There was a running gag about a jeep that could not stop if they wanted it to keep running that was very funny.

I’m not sure if this was worth the effort it took for me to find it, but it was a funny film at times. Xi is easy to root for and the clumsy scientist had its moments too.

I loved the Karate Kid franchise. Still do as I have been enjoying Cobra Kai on Netflix. There was one of the four movies that I had not seen before and so The Next Karate Kid becomes the next film in the DailyView.

Hilary Swank is Julie, a troubled adolescent girl whose parents were killed in an accident. She lives in Boston with her grandmother (Constance Towers), who was the widow of one of Mr. Miyagi’s (Noriyuki “Pat” Morita) wartime friends. With the rebellious Julie causing trouble, Miyagi proposes that the grandmother go back to California and he would stay and help Julie work through her anger.

There are some really odd moments in this movie, which otherwise is the same basic story as the other Karate Kid movies. The only major change is that our main protagonist being trained by Mr. Miyagi is a girl instead of Daniel. However, the film does have a trip to a monastery to give us some life lessons with a group of monks.

Pat Morita is still great as Mr. Miyagi, a role he has clearly mastered after the previous three times he has played him. Still, he is limited by the script and the story of the film. It truly is nothing new here and the only times it shines is when we get Morita on screen. Of course, you can tell that he is not moving as well as he did in past movies as the karate Mr. Miyagi does really moves in slow motion or is filmed in tight, close-up shots.

Hilary Swank has seen better days as an actor. Here, she does not elevate the material above what it is. Her angry girl character is cliché and there is little depth to her performance.

Michael Ironside is the villainous PE teacher Dugan who runs the school’s elite team of bullies. Ironside is so over-the-top that he feels like a cartoon. He takes all of the characteristics of John Kreese from the first two movies and Terry Silver from Karate Kid III and mashes them up into Dugan.

They tried to keep the franchise viable, but they could not. There just was nothing new for the film to investigate. There are scenes that are literally the same as the previous movies, just with Hilary Swank inserted into them instead. That never is a good strategy for a successful movie.

The fish out of water trope is explored in a different manner in The Devil Wears Prada, the next film in the DailyView binge. This is the second Meryl Streep movie I watched today, with Kramer vs. Kramer being the first. You could not find two different roles, both played to perfection by Meryl Steep.

The Devil Wears Prada also features Anne Hathaway and Emily Blunt, highlighting the list of top notch actresses appearing in this movie.

Anne Hathaway played Andy Sachs, a bright college graduation looking to break into the world of journalism. The problem is that she winds up interviewing for a job as an assistant to Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep), the editor in chief of a fashion magazine and one of the most influential names in the industry.

Andy starts off flailing her way through the job, struggling with the impossibility of many of the tasks placed before her by her overbearing boss. Co-worker Emily (Emily Blunt) has been in the position for years, battling her way to a place of importance.

When Andy decides that she is determined to succeed at this job, she begins to transform herself into the type who would be more comfortable in the world of fashion. She begins to create a distance with her boyfriend Nate (Adrian Grenier) and her other friends while becoming more valuable to Miranda.

The Devil Wears Prada has a story that we have seen before (or since as there are many things here shared with Cruella), but the great performances elevate this to a positive note. Meryl Streep takes what could have been a one-dimensional character, but created a fascinating woman who had power and was not afraid to use it.

I know little about the world of fashion, but it looked brutal. The story took the sweet and innocent Andy and turned her into someone who was very different. Watching this happen and seeing how it worked itself out was a lot of fun.

Continuing the DailyView binge this Sunday morning, I pulled up HBO Max and picked out the film Kramer vs. Kramer starring Dustin Hoffman and Meryl Streep.

Kramer vs. Kramer is a tough watch at times as the emotions are a major component of the story.

Joanna (Meryl Streep) has been unhappy in her marriage to Ted (Dustin Hoffman) for years and she has finally gotten to the point that she was ready to leave him and find out who she was. Unfortunately, her situation did not allow her to take her son, Billy (Justin Henry), with her. So she leaves Billy with Ted and walks out.

Ted had never been the most present parent. Working at the ad agency, Ted spent more time at work than being a father. With Joanna gone, Ted was forced to change his life to accommodate his son. At the beginning, the times were rocky, with Ted struggle with his newly defined roles. However, over the months, he slowly began to improve. Above all, he loved his son and he made the adjustments he needed to make.

With things going well, Joanna returned to the picture, having found the personal self-worth she was in search of, and she wanted custody of Billy. The Kramers went to court to fight, often times dirty, to get custody of their son.

Meryl Streep’s character in Kramer vs. Kramer is not as developed as Hoffman’s, mainly because of a lack of screen time in the normal moments. We only seen Joanna in highly emotional states and that colors our perceptions of her. We see the negative side of Ted, but we also get the chance to see him change and to improve his fathering. This is something we do not see with Joanna. We are told that she is a great mother, but we never get a chance to see it. Even when she gets her time with Billy after being gone for months, we do not get to see them interact.

Because of this, Kramer vs. Kramer feels unbalanced. We find ourselves rooting for Ted because we have seen his transformation and we have seen how the relationship between him and Billy has grown. Joanna is not given that same development and one wonders how emotional the movie could have been had it been set up with more of a balance between the mother and father.

The ending also feels as if it comes out of nowhere. We do not see Joanna make any of the revelations that she does in order to come to the decision that she makes. It makes her look even more flighty than she had during the film. It feels as if the character of Joanna is really underserved with the story.

However, the acting in the film is top notch. Both Meryl Streep and Dustin Hoffman are at the top of their game and the only reason you have connection with Joanna at all is because of the skill of Meryl Streep. Strep and Hoffman both won Academy Awards for their work in Kramer vs. Kramer. An unsung performance is that of Justin Henry as Billy. Every scene that required emotional depth, he knocked out of the park. He fit right in with Hoffman and Streep, which is impressive for an eight year old. Though he did not win, Justin Henry was nominated for Best Supporting Actor too.

Though it did feel too one sides, Kramer vs. Kramer is an emotional roller coaster and shows how a father-son relationship can be a successful one. It showed how much the character of Ted loved his son and it explored the pain that can come from custody hearing. I wish they had made Joanna more of a complete character, or at least let us see her develop as well.

Gene Hackman is a natural treasure.

He can make you root for and cheer for a character that is utterly rotten, and he does that in what is considered to be one of the greatest movies made in The French Connection, my next film in the DailyView.

The currently retired Hackman is desperately missed as one of the great actors around. His character of Jimmy ‘Popeye’ Doyle is racist, hard headed, obnoxious, and short-tempered, and, yet, the audience is behind him as he pursued the gentleman Frenchman Alain Charnier (Fernando Rey), a criminal and one of the largest drug suppliers of pure heroin to North America.

Some of the chase scenes in The French Connection are amazing. Filmed practically, the chases (in particularly, the elevated train chase) are breathtaking and thrilling.

The first part of The French Connection is slow and I have to say that I had a hard time getting into the movie at the beginning, but as I moved along, things got considerably more intense and I became more invested.

I found the ending extremely unsettling too, and I loved it. Apparently these characters are based on real people, but it has never stopped films from changing things up for the story. The fact that the end of The French Connection is so shocking that it can be upsetting is a great thing.

The French Connection is a good movie. I did not love it as much as everyone else seemed to, but I did like it.

One of the reasons that I began this DailyView binge this summer was to fill some of the gaping holes of my movie viewing life, especially with the beloved classics. Admittedly, some of the films that I have watched so far in the binge would not be considered classics. However, I have been able to see several that would be considered classics such as The Sound of Music, Apocalypse Now, Saving Private Ryan and Caddyshack. These would fit into that category. So does today’s first film, Michael Mann’s classic heist film, Heat, starring Robert DeNiro and Al Pacino.

Considered one of the greatest heist movies made, Heat was a long film, but it is masterfully developed from the beginning to a major banger of a conclusion. There were definitely a lot to follow here as Heat had a ton of moving parts of the plot with a large group of interwoven characters.

In fact, Heat is absolutely a film that you have to pay attention to and not one that you can put on in the background if you want to understand what was going on. Although, you can also break this down into the basic plot of good vs. evil as the film staged the idea of DeNiro and Pacino facing off with one another.

You see that as early as the iconic scene of DeNiro and Pacino together in the restaurant, “having coffee” but really setting the stage for the rest of the movie. The dialogue in this scene is just tremendous and you can certainly see why this is considered such an amazing scene.

The cast of this movie is just filled with unbelievably talented actors. Sure the eyes are on DeNiro and Pacino, but the fact is that every role, no matter how minor, is cast with amazing actors. Val Kilmer received nearly top billing along with the two icons as his name appeared on the poster. We also had Jon Voight, Tom Sizemore, Amy Brenneman, Ashley Judd, Ted Levine, Dennis Haysbert, Natalie Portman, Mykelti Williamson, Wes Studi, Diane Venora, Tom Noonan, William Fichtner, Hank Azaria, Danny Trejo, Tone Loc, Xander Berkeley, Jeremy Piven, Steven Ford, Patricia Healy, and Martin Ferrero, among others.

The bank robbery scene and the ensuing chaos that is the result of the heist is one of the most insane, breathtaking scenes I have seen in any crime movie. It is set up beautifully by Michael Mann and his crew and it truly shows how skilled Mann is in this genre.

I did struggle at the very beginning keeping everything straight, but Heat pays off in the second and third acts like few other movies. There was an intensity of performance and situation that is able to isolate the similarities and differences between our protagonist and antagonist. There is almost a respect between them that demands to be faced.

Having said that, there may have been a plot point or two that could have been taken out which wouldn’t have affected the overall story (I’m thinking about much of Pacino’s home life issues). The extra bits do help deepen the characters, but some of the side plot points do wind up unresolved so do they really serve a purpose?

Heat is not a movie that I would normally seek out, but I am glad I did. I got a chance to see two powerhouse actors in their prime and delivering a master class in acting, despite only being on screen with each other a minimal amount of time. The film has been carefully constructed and works on many levels.

Trying to fit one more movie into the DailyView today, but the time was limited. As I was going through the list of Starz movies, I came across the cult film that spawned a huge hit TV show, Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

I had never seen the movie, but I was a big fan of the TV series with Sarah Michelle Geller as the Slayer. I had always heard that the movie Buffy was not very good and so I had avoided it. However, this felt like a good moment to sample it (especially since it was just 85 minutes).

You know what? I did not hate it.

Yes, it wasn’t anywhere near as good as the series. You could tell that the series took the best parts of the concept and built something awesome out of it.

Joss Whedon was the writer on the movie, and he would take the ideas and build a great series later, but the writing on the film was a drawback. This did not have the typically witty and funny dialogue that Whedon is known for. In fact, the dialogue here was the biggest weakness of the movie.

The cast was deep and strong with Kristy Swanson as Buffy Summers leading the pack. Then we had Rutger Hauer, Paul Reubens, Donald Sutherland, Luke Perry, Hilary Swank, David Arquette, and Stephen Root. This is a really strong cast. Unfortunately, they just did not have enough to do for this great ensemble.

Kristy Swanson did a solid job as Buffy, but she is always going to pale in comparison to Sarah Michelle Geller. Still, her efforts here keep the film on a path.

The story felt too crammed into the time frame of the film. A TV series is a much more effective way to tell this story and you can tell why the TV show was such a hit. The tone was a bit too goofy in the movie. In the TV show, even the ridiculous parts were treated seriously. That helped make the humorous parts stand out more. The movie had silly reactions and moments that undermined the action/story with the response (aka Paul Reubens’ death scene for example).

I also missed the vampires turning into dust when stabbed with the wooden stakes. That is an effect that was added to the TV show and made a very solid visual image.

Now, it may not be fair for me to compare the TV show to the movie. The TV show had the advantage of improving the areas that needed improving and spreading out the story elements. The movie did not have that benefit. Looking at it only as a movie and not comparing it to the TV show, the movie was okay. It was better than I thought it would be. It had some story issues and the pacing was off, but I have certainly seen worse movies.

I tried watching this film yesterday, but HBO Max was having some spasms here, so I had to put off this science fiction film, the feature film debut of George Lucas. The film was called THX 1138 and it is a futuristic, dystopian world where people do not have names, only designations and all sexual encounters have been removed.

THX (Robert Duvall) and LUH (Maggie McOmie) rebelled against this rigid society’s rules and connected with each other.

I was just bored out of my mind with this movie. While it is a beautiful film to watch with some of the more intriguing visual shots you are going to see in a science fiction movie with its minimalist style and white backgrounds, I just could not get into this story. The lack of exposition, while a brave choice, keeps the audience members at arms length, since it only continues to increase a level of confusion about what was happening.

The film feels like a thought experiment more than it does a story, but there just is not enough ideas here to make it a science fiction story. There are some fascinating visual storytelling here and you can see some of the director’s chops that would help create on of the seminal works of fiction of all time in Star Wars.

Not one of my favorite films for the DailyView.

I think this is the first movie with Walter Matthau that I have reviewed. I have seen movies with Matthau in them, but I do not think that I have written up any of them. The first film from the classic actor that will make the DailyView and Doc’s Classic Movies Reviewed is The Taking of Pelham One Two Three.

A group of four heavily armed men, led by Mr. Blue (Robert Shaw), hijacked one of the New York Subway Trains, holding the passengers on it hostage. The men made a demand of $1,000,000 or else they would begin killing hostages one at a time. Matthau is Lt. Zachary Garber, who is part of the NY Transit Police, communicates with the hijackers and get their list of demands. He also manages the attempt to stop what they were intending to do.

Walter Matthau is excellent here, his snarky dialogue and sarcastic tone working in overdrive. His character is in direct contradiction to Mr. Blue’s refined, snobby European type character. One would think there eventually was some inspiration from Mr. Blue for the character of Hans Gruber in Die Hard.

Jaws’ Robert Shaw is a wonderful opposition to Matthau’s character. Shaw is playing a thinking man’s villain and is about as cold blooded as you could get.

The film does a great job of keeping you on the edge of your seat while still having moments of humor. The differing tones do not feel out of place and work together well.

The ending of the movie really works well and provides a couple of shocking moments that you do not see coming. The film is making the argument about how the desire for money can poison some people.

The film includes several familiar faces including character actors Martin Balsam, Earl Hindman, Jerry Stiller, Dick O’Neill, Doris Roberts, James Broderick, Nathan George, Lee Wallace (playing a Mayor as he did several times in his career) and Hector Elizondo. Many of these actors wound up playing supporting roles on sitcoms over the years.

This was a quick, enjoyable story of the conflict between good and evil, and showcases the efforts of the public servants in emergencies. There was a bit with four Japanese businessmen early into the film that made no sense and felt a little racist, but that is the time frame of the 1970s sticking its backward thinking into the film. Other than that, The Taking of Pelham One Two Three was a lot of fun and was exciting to see.