Atlas
Netflix
Folks on the interwebs have been coming down hard on Jennifer Lopez since her ill-advised visual album thing This Is Me ... Now and associated documentary earlier this year.
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She's been a subject of ridicule and many people have taken to saying she is untalented.
Obviously, those people have not seen her excellent work in Out of Sight, Selena, Hustlers or even Maid in Manhattan.
What JLo really needed was another film to showcase her strengths and turn the tide of online sentiment.
Sadly, Atlas is far, far away from that.
The sci-fi action film sees Lopez play the titular character, whose mother created a human-like AI called Harlan (played by Simu Liu, Shang-Chi) who broke his programming, infected other bots and started wiping out humans before fleeing to a faraway planet.
Now all these years later, Atlas is the expert on Harlan, and talks her way onto an expedition to bring him back from his space base.
Of course, all goes very wrong, and Atlas ends up stuck with a giant bipedal machine - like those in Pacific Rim or Avatar - and must find her escape from the planet, while bonding with the AI on board, named Smith.
The film is essentially a sci-fi road movie, where one half of the lead duo is just a floating blob on a screen.
The effects, filming, plot and production design are all so poor it looks like this film was made in the '90s by the team behind Xena: Warrior Princess. JLo is clearly giving the performance her all, but when everything else is barely at passable level, it just makes her efforts look even more ridiculous.
It would be a surprise if anyone actually finishes this dumpster fire of a film.
Also stars Mark Strong and Sterling K Brown, both of whom, like Lopez and Liu, are too good for this trash movie.
The Blue Angels
Prime Video
As far as a feature-length piece of military propaganda can be good, The Blue Angels is pretty good.
This documentary film - produced by Top Gun: Maverick star Glen Powell and prolific director J.J. Abrams - follows the US Navy's Blue Angels team, a group of six fighter jet pilots who perform death-defying and jaw-dropping aerial stunts on a promotional tour across the country every year.
The footage is pretty spectacular, and apparently in the US this film was also released in IMAX theatres, which would have been quite the experience.
We follow the team, which includes pilots finishing up their time with the Blue Angels, and others just starting out, from their intense preparations to hitting the road on tour and welcoming the next year's recruits.
It is interesting to see all the work that goes into these shows, where the pilots strive for the Yankee configuration of their Diamond flight set (the closest they can get their planes to one another) while dazzling audiences spread out on beaches, but it also seems like an unnecessary waste of funds and lives (28 pilots have been killed while serving with the Blue Angels team) for what is essentially a recruitment tool.
Tires
Netflix
It's awkward, brash and foul-mouthed but also a little charming.
Netflix's new low-budget, no-frills workplace comedy Tires (which would be Tyres for us Aussies) follows the team at an automotive shop who are trying to bring in business after accidentally ordering way too many tyres, the haphazard guy in charge and his unreliable staff.