Cereal At Midnight

Every time I watch a movie that's based on real events or real people, my defenses go up. Biopics, seemingly by their very nature, are often fictions, making superheroes out of people who are far more interesting in reality because their lives aren't sanitized or sanctified by screenwriters. Somewhere in the middle of Song Sung Blue , I decided I was being served up a string of tall tales. Surely nobody went through as much triumph and tragedy as the real Mike and Claire Sardina, better known by their stage name, Lightning and Thunder. When the end credits rolled and I saw that the film was based on a 2008 documentary of the same name, I knew I needed to see that  film to unravel just how much of the story I'd just been told was actually real.  As it turns out, many of the events presented in the movie really happened. Sure, the Neil Diamond tribute act called Lightning and Thunder never soared quite to the heights that the Hollywood film would have us believe, and it goes ...

Deadpool & Wolverine is less a movie and more a collection of fan service, references, and easter eggs. At the same time, it's a shot in the arm for the flagging Marvel Cinematic Universe, which really should have ended (or at least gone into hibernation) following Avengers: Endgame. Listen, everyone knows the score here: Deadpool exists to break the fourth wall and offering meta commentary on the experience of the film as it happens. It's both refreshing and exhausting in equal portions, but the constant inside jokes that call out everything from other Ryan Reynolds movies to the Disney purchase of Fox to deep cuts for comic book aficionados effectively render non-stop dopamine hits for the viewer that keep things moving along and distract us from the shortcomings of the story. Take out all the fun references and what we're left with isn't much: Deadpool's reality is collapsing because Logan sacrificed himself a few years ago (in 2017's LOGAN, natch), and n...